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INCREASING HOME EFFICIENCY 



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THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO 
DALLAS • SAN FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 

TORONTO 



INCREASING 

HOME EFFICIENCY 



BY 

MARTHA BENSLEY BRUfiRE 

AND 

ROBERT W. BRU£RE 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

1912 

All rights reserved 



^^^ 



\^ 



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Copyright, 191 i, bv P. F. Collier & Sons, 

The Success Company, The Crowell Publishing Company, 

The Outlook Company. 

Copyright, 191 2, by The Outlook Company, 
Harper and Brothers. 

Copyright, 191 2, 
By the MACMILLAN COMPANY 



Set up and electrotyped. Published November, igia. 



PHCSS or T. MOREY <i SON 

GREENFIELD, MASS., U. S. A. 



CI,A327800 



We gratefully acknowledge 
the courtesy of the editors 
of The Outlook, Har- 
per's Magazine, Collier's 
Weekly, Success and The 
Woman's Home Com- 
panion in permitting us to 
use material originally pub- 
lished in their magazines. 

M. B. B. 
R. W. B. 






Contents 



Chapter Page 

I. How the Wind Blows ..... i 

II. What Is the Home For? .... 9 

III. The Basis of Efficiency .... 25 

IV. Chance versus the Budget ... 46 
V. First Aid to the Budget-Maker . . 75 

VI. Home Administration .... 94 

VII. The Home and the Market . . .118 

VIII. A Housekeeper's Defense of the Trusts . 143 

IX. How Shall We Learn to Keep House? . 161 

X. Training the Consumer . . • .180 

XI. The Cost of Children . . . • i97 

XII. Launching the Child .... 236 

XIII. Savings and Efficiency . . . .263 

XIV. One Answer to Many Questions . . 288 

Appendix ^93 



Increasing 
Home Efficiency 

CHAPTER I 
How THE Wind Blows 

WE kept house one summer in an at- 
tractive middle-class suburb, under the 
ordinary conditions that make for com- 
fort and compel circumspection among middle- 
class people. 

One day our next door neighbor came running 
across the lawn and flounced — there is no other 
name for it — flounced down upon our veranda. 

"Fm nothing but a family clearing house!" she 
cried distractedly. "I run up the family bills one 
month and pay them the next! I buy what the 
stores have to sell at the price they choose to set, — 
I pay rent for a house somebody else has chosen to 
build, — I send the children to the sort of school 
the town has happened to establish, — I dress, and 
come, and go, and read, and see, as other people 
have arranged for me! What have I to do with 
it all? Merely to pay the bills with money I 
haven't earned! I don't control a single thing that 



2 Increasing Home Efficiency 

goes Into my housekeeping, and yet I know that 
unless I see to it that we have what it is best for 
us to have, I am not running my home efficiently." 

This was considerable of a jounce to us. Was 
not our neighbor's house clean to whiteness ? Her 
children literate and well mannered.^ Her dress 
in fashion.? Her mind well stocked .f^ Moreover 
had we not eaten happily at her board.? Not effi- 
cient indeed! What problems did she find unsolv- 
able.? 

We have not found her problems even stated in 
print. Literature is, to be sure, peculiarly rich in 
cook books, and people are apt when they hear we 
are interested in home efficiency, to ask if we have 
seen the latest edition of Mrs. Pancake's volume 
and know the government publications on how to 
cook the cheaper cuts of meat, — as though the 
middle-class home were merely a popular-priced 
family dining hall! It was not the preparation of 
food that made our neighbor feel she was fumbling 
her job. 

Neither are the middle-class problems reflected 
in fiction. Imaginative writers ordinarily choose- 
the very rich for their subjects. They cling to the 
romantic tradition that loves to linger in the pal- 
aces and amid the gorgeous trappings of the leisure 
class, and when they do depart from their romantic 
tradition they are likely to plunge to the other 
extreme — to the heroic poor, the labor and trag- 
edy of whose lives supply situations almost as 
thrilling as the dare-devil adventures of the noble 
gentleman desperately struggling for the noble 



How the Wind Blows 3 

lady, or for the bag of gold, or both. And the 
economists, too, like to deal with the captains of 
industry, the conspicuously successful, or with the 
poor who are compelled to exchange their privacy 
for alms. The middle-class, because it is neither 
so rich as to dazzle the attention, nor so poor as to 
have to submit to investigation, is, as it were, 
discreetly passed by. 

We did, however, find our neighbor's perplex- 
ities constantly fringing the gossip of our middle- 
class friends. 

"How much do you think I have to pay for but- 
ter at Markins.^" 

"I think I'll have to send Ethel to Miss Lacy's 
School, — she isn't getting on well in her grade." 

"The way this silk cuts on the folds is simply 
appalling. There's no wear to it!" 

"I hate to have Frederick go into the office, but 
I don't see what else the boy is going to do." 

"Did you hear that they've got typhoid down 
at Mason's .^ They say there's a leak in the drain." 

"William says he's going to take out another 
^5000 insurance so the children and I'll be provided 
for if anything was to happen : but how the money's 
to come out of his salary I don't see." 

Such sayings had hovered in the air unnoticed 
until our neighbor's plaint that she was nothing 
but a clearing house for the family bills precipi- 
tated them in a rain of questions. Was it possible 
that the home maker must solve her problems of 
marketing in connection with the great powers of 
production and manufacture.? Must she make the 



4 Increasing Home Efficiency 

public service corporations her household servants? 
Must she control the public school system, and 
business and the professions in order to launch her 
children properly? Must she draw on the surplus 
of a nation to provide for old age ? And could any 
individual industry, intelligence or thrift enable 
her to meet these forces single handed when they 
met her in combination? Surely so able a woman 
as our neighbor would not be baffled by problems 
that could be corralled within the four walls of her 
home! Had not a little Quaker lady of Indiana 
her hundredth birthday just past, said to us: 

"I declare I don't see what women find to do 
with themselves these days ! Pretty nigh all their 
house work's done for them — what with gas light 
and carpet-sweepers and all!" 

Was It not possible that our neighbor was play- 
ing blind man's buff with her problems; trying to 
catch them In one place when they had gone to 
another? Where could she put her finger on the 
price of electricity? Could she control the price of 
meat or keep wood out of the nutmegs simply 
by paying her bills? These did not seem mat- 
ters that could be attended to on the Domestic 
Hearth. 

Take the simple matter of garbage removal — 
obviously a housekeeper's problem. Time was 
when we moved out of the New York East Side 
onto Fifth Avenue, and brought many of our 
East Side habits with us. There none so aristo- 
cratic as to think of having his ash or garbage can 
emptied by a privately subsidized menial. But 



How the Wind Blows 5 

when we had crossed the Bowery, and Broadway, 
and Fourth Avenue, and University Place and 
come into the region where people have days at 
home and dress for dinner; when we trustingly cast 
our ash cans forth in the morning as the East Side 
law had required, lo, there was none to tend them! 
To be sure a representative of the private company 
that collected cans in the neighborhood called and 
offered to remove ours — for a consideration. He 
seemed turned to a pillar of scorn when we told 
him that we expected the city to do the work. 
Extremely unpopular It made us with our aristo- 
cratic neighbors also to have the city dump carts 
drive up and stand before our lawn-fronted resi- 
dence, especially since they seldom came on time, 
and showed a disposition to leave part of the refuse 
about, a thing we could well appreciate meant dis- 
comfort for our neighbors. But our backs were 
up, and we said: 

"Shall any inadequate ash man force out of our 
pockets two dollars a month that we need for food 
or clothes? No I" 

And we began a system of jacking the street 
cleaning department up to its work. It took tele- 
phoning and time, but the city ash man came to 
have a furtive look as he approached our door, and 
dusting his hands on his breeks, he would pick up 
our cans with gingerly softness, empty them cir- 
cumspectly and proceed subduedly down the 
street. 

We never succeeded in making our servant the 
government earn its wages from our neighbors. 



6 Increasing Home EflSciency 

The prejudice among the velvet clad that the 
government is a fit servant only for the poor, is 
hard to break down; but if the whole neighbor- 
hood, or the whole city had insisted on this depart- 
ment's earning its wages, would it not have solved 
one of our housekeeper's problems? 

We are writing from a small town in New York 
State where there seem to be no rich and no poor. 
To one who has not been taken into the inner coun- 
cils it appears that home efficiency is rampant. 
When our neighbors call they are habited In silk, 
and their hats droop over their eyes in quite the 
fashion of Paris. When, carefully gloved, we 
return their calls, we find the parlors swept and 
garnished to spotlessness, the lawns smoothly 
green and pleasant vines blowing against the 
windows. But as we look down the road comes 
the cook tolling up from the village with a pail of 
water, for though it is a land of springs and a 
season of rain, the wells, which except in the very 
center of the village are the only source of supply, 
are in such close proximity to the surface sewage 
as to be unsafe. The center of the village is fed 
by a pure and constant water supply from the 
public mains regularly tested by the State's chem- 
ist. What shall it profit a family to have a clean 
parlor If they have a dirty well.^ 

Natural gas has been struck a mile or so away. 
It lights the town at so low a rate that the cost of 
letting it burn all day in the streets is less than the 
cost of hiring a man to turn It on and oflF. Yet all 
through the region Monday morning sees the cor- 



How the Wind Blows 7 

rugated washboard carried out to the well and the 
housewife bending above it, looking for her prob- 
lem inside a galvanized iron tub instead of raising 
her eyes to the cheap gas (blazing all about her) 
which could run a washing machine or a coopera- 
tive laundry. 

The new three story school house has the coal 
deftly stored below the exit that must be used in 
case of fire. Are the homes then overproducing.^ 

From the day our neighbor flounced down upon 
our porch, the problems of middle-class home 
making began to peep like goblins from everything 
we heard or saw; they made eyes at us from the 
shelves of the groceryman, they shot like steam 
from the factory whistle, they trailed the loco- 
motives across the country, they buzzed in our 
ears through the telephone wire. The clothes we 
wore and did not make, the food we ate from Flor- 
ida and Minneapolis and Chicago and California, 
the books we read from presses we had never 
seen, — all turned to problems in our hands. Were 
they the universal middle-class problems, and if 
so what was their solution.^ 

There was no way of finding out except by con- 
sulting the experiences of those who like our sub- 
urban neighbor were wrestling with them. So 
we set out into the middle-class country to gather 
these experiences. They were not things that 
could be collected under compulsion or by gum- 
shoe work; you can't investigate the middle- 
class, as you can the poor, without its free consent. 
Through the columns of magazines, through lee- 



8 Increasing Home Efficiency 

tures, through innumerable personal letters and 

long journeys we have put questions to middle- | 

class people in all corners of the country until I 

answers have flowed in to us like oil from a shot | 

well. j 

This book is a record of these answers. It is \ 

made up of the real experiences of real middle-class • 

people. It does not pretend to finality. It is not ^ 

a tablet of laws nor an economic treatise. It is j 
hardly more than a weather vane to show how the 
wind blows. 



CHAPTER II 
What is the Home For? 

ONCE upon a time there was a man whose 
home was his castle; it provided the 
greatest luxury of his day — safety. 

That man is dead. 

Then there came a man whose home was a fac- 
tory in which he and his wife and his children and 
his man servants and his maid servants did the 
manufacturing of the world. He consumed what 
he needed and bartered the rest. 

That man is dead too. 

Later appeared a man whose home was merely 
a unit cell in the great battery that drives civiliza- 
tion forward. 

That man, socially speaking, is just born. 

We are not concerned with those dead men ex- 
cept to remove from our pathway such useless 
and pernicious legacies as they have inconsid- 
erately left us. Not the least disastrous of these 
is the idea that the running of the home can safely 
be left to instinct, moral sentiment, and romantic 
inspiration. Somehow we have got to still their 
ghost-voices that chant persistently: 

"Who would not worship 
The hand that has taught us 
Five Hundred and Eighty-two 
Ways to cook eggs!^^ 
9 



lo Increasing Home Efficiency 

For while we listen to their chanting, the hen has 
become trustified, her versatile product cornered 
in cold-storage, and the hand worthy of worship 
is left without eggs to cook. When we stop listen- 
ing to this soporific song of the past, we may get 
time to open our eyes and see that the modern 
home is but a cell in the social body held tight in 
its material setting by the underground filaments 
of pipe and wire and conduit, by the surface con- 
nection of common carriers, public utilities and 
corporate industries, and embedded in the meso- 
blastic jelly of common thought, and interest, and 
ambition. Are not our homes bound together into 
the unit, not of families or nations, but of the race 
itself.^ How can we know what the function of 
any individual home is except by examining it as 
a part of the larger body.^ Or whether it performs 
this function efficiently but by appraising its social 
effect.? 

Like every living body, society does carry along 
with it a lot of dead cells, a lot of menacing cells 
which it takes an overplus of health to absorb 
and get rid of; static quiescent cells that give the 
social body nothing in return for what they take 
from it, as well as the active, useful members that 
push society ahead because they give back more 
than they consume. 

Isn't this what the home is for, to give back to 
the community more than it takes out of it.'* To 
produce something more valuable than it con- 
sumes.? Is there any way to judge of the home's 
efficiency except by its social product.? Or any 



What is the Home for? n 

way to judge the value of that product except 
by Its effect on the race? 

Mr. Frederick W. Taylor says that his book 
on the Principles of Scientific Management was 
written to show that the remedy for what the 
country is losing through inefficiency is general 
scientific management, a science resting upon 
clearly defined laws. In applying efficiency meth- 
ods to industry, Mr. Taylor has the advantage 
of knowing what each particular plant is trying to 
produce. But when we try to apply them to the 
largest, most universal business we have, Home- 
making, we find that almost no one knows 
what the home is trying to do, or what it ought 
to do. 

Mr. Taylor's first experiment, — to systematize 
the loading of pig iron, — was a simple problem: 
given the pig iron, the cars and the men, to place 
the first onto the second by means of the third. 
But in the problem of systematizing the household 
we have: given an income derived from some source 
unnamed, certain intelligence or the lack of it in 
certain unstandardized individuals, certain physi- 
cal strength, and certain elements of climate, 
temperament, occupation and markets, — to pro- 
duce through the medium of a more or less per- 
manent abiding place, the best results in the way 
of useful citizenship and personal happiness; the 
term "best" in this connection being necessarily 
undefined. It doesn't sound like a thing you could 
reduce to an equation. And yet we need des- 
perately to know just what proportion of money 



12 Increasing Home Efficiency 

and brains and muscle are necessary to keep the 
average family group in a state advantageous to 
the community, and how if the home is under- 
supplied with any one of these three, it can sub- 
stitute one of the others; money, brains and muscle 
being interchangeable parts of the home-running 
machine. For the home is properly a machine to 
make something with, not a self-sufficient, dis- 
associated fact. It is efficient not through its 
own internal harmony, but through its ability 
to produce something socially valuable. 

Mr. Gilbreth, speaking at the Lake Placid Con- 
ference on Home Economics in 191 2, said that 
scientific management must be based not on what 
we think but on what we know, and that the way 
to begin to know is to observe things as they are. 
He said that the first man needed in the reorgan- 
ization of a plant was an inspector. 

From the standpoint of an inspector, then, is the 
Shaw family running its home efficiently.^ They 
know what product they want their home factory 
to turn out and they are succeeding according to 
their own standards of success. But are they run- 
ning their factory efficiently from the standpoint 
of the community.^ 

The Shaws are not only American by birth, but 
by generations of tradition as well. Mr. Shaw 
started as a carpenter and builder, married a school 
teacher, and in 1881 settled in a little Massachusetts 
town which has since become an almost fashionable 
suburb of Boston. They are solid middle-class 
people. Their family consists of man, wife, two 



What is the Home for? 13 

sons and a daughter. Mr. Shaw has advanced 
until he Is now superintendent of a factory where 
they make real old Colonial furniture. He and 
his wife are happy in their success; and proud of 
the way they achieved it. Mr. Shaw writes: 

"I just worked every day that it was possible 
for me to do so. I saved as fast as I could. If I got 
a dollar or two extra, I saved it. The two boys 
were some ambitious to get ahead. I tried to in- 
still into their minds that with their help, and the 
help and economy of their mother and myself, 
they could have an education, and we went about 
it with a will. Bear in mind it was our aim to 
lift the boys one step above the step mother and 
I stood on." 

And they believe they have succeeded because 
they have pushed their children into the clerical 
occupations. 

"Our oldest boy got a one-half scholarship in 

the College," Mr. Shaw adds, "but we 

had carfare, board and books to pay for. Every 
vacation he worked and saved his money. In 
four years he was outfitted for the hardships of the 
world and now he has a job keeping books and 
gets ^90 a month. The next boy took a business 
course. He learned stenography and typewriting 
and got a job at $50 a month. But he said he 
would not work long at those wages, and he is 
now secretary to the manager of the Com- 
pany at a salary of $150 a month. Jennie is still 
getting educated, but I expect she will turn out all 
right." 



14 Increasing Home Efficiency 

Here is the Shaw budget (compiled and aver- 
aged from the family account books) : 

Income $2,400 a year. Two adults and three 
children. 

Monthly Yearly 

Food $ 42.00 $ 504.00 

Shelter (mortgage, repairs, taxes) 33.00 396.00 

Clothes 16.00 192.00 

Operating costs: 

Help $10.00 

Heat and light 8.00 

Carfare 6.00 

Refurnishing 4.50 28.50 342.00 

Advancement: 

Doctor, dentist, medicine $11.00 

Church, charity 14.00 

Vacation, travel, books, 

amusement 3.25 

Incidentals 7.45 

Insurance (fire and life) . . 9.80 

Savings 3S-oo 80.50 966.00 

$200.00 $2,400.00 

During the time when his children were growing 
up, Mr. Shaw was not earning half as much as he 
is now. It is the strait economy he and his wife 
practiced then, the amount of muscle and brain 
that they learned to substitute for money, that 
makes them able now to put $35 into the 
savings bank every month. That looks like ad- 



What is the Home for? 15 

mirable thrift. But their expense for vacations, 
travel, books and amusements in their almost 
fashionable suburb, where many sorts of entertain- 
ment are to be had, is only ^3.25 a month — $39 a 
year, while their expenses for sickness come to 
$132. This item raises the insistent question: 
if during their years of hard work they had spent 
that ^132 for vacations, wouldn't the $39 have 
been enough for the doctor? It seems to us that 
Mrs. Shaw's letters throw some light on that ex- 
cessive doctor's bill. 

"Last year I kept help," she writes. "I paid 
her ^10 a month and let her attend evening school 
and have time to study besides; but I think she 
cost as much again in food and what she wasted. 
So this year I do my own work and sometimes 
have a woman come in to wash." 

Mrs. Shaw also suggests the reason why the 
amount spent on clothes is about half what the 
theoretic budget allows. 

"Mr. S. and the boys always get their clothes 
ready made. A suit costs them about twenty dol- 
lars unless they get it at a sale. I have a dress- 
maker come to the house to make Jennie's and 
my clothes. My best dress costs about twenty- 
five dollars and it generally wears me three years." 

One sometimes wishes that Mrs. Shaw wouldn't 
have all her clothes made at home, that she 
wouldn't consider her savings account too care- 
fully when she buys a hat, that she wasn't so fond 
of. golden oak furniture, quarter-sawed and var- 
nished high, that she knew the difference between 



1 6 Increasing Home Efficiency 

scarlet and crimson and wouldn't use these good 
fast colors so profusely. This may sound like put- 
ting a carping emphasis on aesthetics — but is it? 
Have the Shaws done anything to justify them in 
turning loose an ugly home and ugly clothes on 
an unprotected community? The output of their 
domestic factory so far is two sons able to earn 
living salaries, who are useful to the community 
undoubtedly, but as easy to replace if damaged as 
any other standard products that come a dozen 
to the box. They themselves didn't like the upper 
reaches of the artisan class where they had spent 
their lives, so they boosted their sons till they could 
make a living by the sweat of their brains instead 
of the sweat of their brows. Society can use the 
Shaw boys, but is it profitable to produce them at 
the price? The money that made these boys into 
a clerk and stenographer cost twenty years of their 
parents' brain and muscle. Mrs. Shaw has bred 
the habit of saving into her own bones till now 
when she might shift the flat-iron, the cook-stove 
and the sewing machine from her shoulders, she 
can't let go the $io a month her "help" eats and 
wastes, long enough to straighten up her spine. 
These two boys and a daughter still in the making 
have cost their father and mother twenty years 
which Mr. Shaw sums up by saying: 

" So you see the final result of making up your 
mind to do a thing, including the great trouble of 
bringing up a family, is just getting down to the 
ground and grinding." 

Isn't it just possible that society has lost as 



What is the Home for? 17 

much in the parents as it has gained in the chil- 
dren? Couldn't we have got the same product 
some cheaper way? Or a better product by more 
efficient home management? 

Mr. Shaw's philosophy that we win by the things 
we go without is an old, old road to success, — a kind 
of success. It was beaten out at the time when 
there wasn't enough of anything to go round, 
when that man was more likely to survive who 
could get along on little than the man who needed 
a great deal to satisfy his wants. That road is 
growing full of weeds though such people as the 
Shaws still try to travel it, quite deaf to the good 
able-bodied Angel of Plenty crying warningly as 
they plod: 

"Thou shalt not live by Thrift alone!" 

Now in contrast to the output of the Shaws' 
home and its methods of operation, is the house- 
hold of the Parnells down on the edge of Kansas. 
As far as we have climbed up their family tree, we 
have found their ancestors living on their heads. 
Mrs. Parnell's father was a business man in a small 
Illinois city. Mr. Parnell's father was a doctor. 
They both belonged to the circle of those who toil 
and spin vicariously. Nineteen years ago Mr. 
and Mrs. Parnell took their two babies and settled 
as farmers on the Kansas prairie. So many people 
think it is easier to compete with the coddling 
moth, the cinch bug and the cut worm for the 
crops, than with their human neighbors for a job! 

The Parnells have gradually changed their open 
prairie into fields and farms. Some of these they 



1 8 Increasing Home Efficiency 

have sold, some they rent to tenants, some they 
work themselves, and as their income for recent 
years averages ^4,000 a year, they have obviously 
prospered. They have four children now and are 
no longer farmers in the old sense of the word. 
They have changed with their environment, which 
the biologists tell us is quite the correct thing for a 
form of life that wishes to persist, to do. Mrs. 
Parnell writes : 

"Mother spent five weeks with me in July and 
August, and she said we were as much suburbanites 
as she is. You know she lives in Evanston where 
most of the men do business in Chicago. And it is 

really true, for the city of has grown out 

toward us, and the trolley lines and good auto- 
mobile roads have done the rest. I do not feel 
that I live in the country much more than you do. 
Why, I even belong to a club that is affiliated with 
yours in New York." 

Now if the Parnells were the average people — 
those mythical average people who are as detached 
from hampering peculiarities of temperament and 
locality as China dolls, — they would, according to 
the accepted proportions, spend their ^4,000 a 
year like this: 

Food $1,000.00 

Shelter 800.00 

Clothes 600.00 

Operating 600.00 

Advancement 1,000.00 

$4,000.00 



What is the Home for? 19 

But being real human beings with particular 
problems of their own, they divide up their income 
on this plan: 

Income ^4,000 a year. Family: Father, mother, 
four children. 

Food $ 600.00 

Shelter (taxes, repairs, improvements, etc.) 475 -oo 

Clothes 450.00 

Operating 625.00 

Advancement: 

College (two daughters) $1,000.00 

Insurance (fire and life) 148.00 

Vacation trips 200.00 

Gifts, charity, church 60.00 

Books, etc 50.00 

Miscellaneous 192.00 

Savings 200.00 1,850.00 

$4,000.00 

For farm people who could raise all they eat if 
they had to, they spend a great deal for food; a 
lot for operating expenses, since this does not in- 
clude the cost of farm hands; a lot for education 
and vacation trips; but not much for clothes. In 
commenting on her expenditures, Mrs. Parnell 
writes : 

"You ask me whether we have a garden and I 
feel apologetic when I tell you that we have only 
the smallest kind of a one. There is no reason why 
we could not have all the fruit and vegetables we 
could use, for a few miles away from us there are 



• 



20 Increasing Home EflBciency 

apples to throw away, and gardens seem to just 
take care of themselves and put their produce in 
the cellar. I think the great reason why we go 
gardenless is the difficulty of getting farm hands. 
We need all we can get to do the regular field work, 
and never seem to have one to spare for vege- 
tables. I suppose the children and I might do it 
ourselves, but such work takes a lot out of me and 
I rather save some other way. We do however 
make our butter; eggs and chickens defray the 
cost of living, and the profits from the stock and 
crops pay the taxes and repair the house, provide 
us with water and lighting plants and labor-saving 
machinery, send the children to college and pay 
for a trip now and then." 

Mrs. Parnell insists that labor-saving machinery 
is an economy whether it pays in money or not. 
She says it not only saves her own strength, but 
the mental wear and tear of getting and keeping 
servants, that she doesn't have to ask a vacuum 
cleaner if it wants to live in Kansas or if it likes 
being a hired hand on the farm. She substitutes 
money for the muscle she might use in raising 
her own vegetables; spends money for service to 
save time so that she can go to her club in town; 
saves money on clothes to send her daughters to 
college, and doesn't put a great deal into the bank 
anyway. Her house is not altogether perfect in 
the New England sense; it's very much lived in 
by her four romping children. She and her hus- 
band have undoubtedly worked hard; they have 
applied business methods to the farm, and they've 



What is the Home for? 21 

been fortunate. They haven't sacrificed them- 
selves greatly. Loading their pig iron has con- 
sisted in living happily themselves and fitting their 
children to spend the same sort of easy-going 
happy lives after them. They are not trying to 
get their children into another class than their 
own as the Shaws are — possibly they are not con- 
scious that there is a higher one. 

"Just think," said an eastern woman who had 
been a school friend of Mrs. Parnell's, "Clara is 
sending her children to a western college! I'm so 
disappointed in her! Why, they've money enough 
so she could send them anywhere! Just think 
what they're missing! And Clara used to be one 
of the most progressive girls!" 

Mrs. Parnell would argue that she is a middle- 
west country woman and is training her children 
for the same country life. She and her husband 
revolted against the prospect of being clerks or 
struggling professional people. They fled to the 
soil, and they still think that their children have 
the best chance of happiness and prosperity in 
farm life. 

"The agricultural colleges seem to fit our needs 
better than any others," she writes. "The grad- 
uates whom we know find good openings as farmers 
or foresters or agricultural experts of some sort. 
I'm satisfied to give the children a good practical 
working education." 

The Parnells have reversed the standards of the 
Shaws. They are on the other swing of the pendu- 
lum and think the clerk, the bookkeeper and the 



22 Increasing Home Efficiency 

stenographer are people to be pitied. But the 
Shaws would probably pity the Parnells in turn 
because they save so little money. Two hundred 
out of four thousand isn't much to "put by," and 
sometimes Mrs. Parnell spends even the two hun- 
dred. The Shaws would very probably echo the 
sentiments of a shocked gentleman from Oregon 
who once wrote us about a woman who spent a 
three thousand dollar income. He didn't see that 
this woman had proved anything except that she 
could get rid of $3,000 a year — and anybody could 
do that! If she had shown how she could save 
two-thirds of her husband's income, she would 
have been worth while. 

"I guess when she is old or when her husband 
dies, she'll know more about the value of money 
than she does now," he concluded. 

Perhaps she will! Perhaps Mrs. Parnell too will 
think regretfully of the money she might have 
saved. But after all, the earth can produce enough 
each year to feed everybody, and is all one's life 
to be a preparation for possible misfortune.^ Are 
we to look forward to a future inevitably calam- 
itous? If trouble only comes late enough, you've 
little chance to remember it and more chance to 
dodge it altogether — the mortality rates being 
what they are. The healthy reason hasn't much 
sympathy with the New England woman who could 
never afford anything to wear to tea-parties be- 
cause she must spend her money on a suit of black 
in case of possible funerals. 

The methods of this salaried man and this 



What is the Home for? 23 

farmer are not given as models by any means. 
They are examples of how two families have ac- 
tually made their homes turn out the sort of prod- 
uct they intended; examples of how the incomes of 
money, strength and brains have been spent; of 
how if either of them saved money, they had to 
spend something else in its place, and had to de- 
cide whether it was more valuable than money or 
not. The Shaws' method was to save money, the 
Parnells' method to save strength and worry in- 
stead. Sitting on the fence between approbation 
and condemnation, which of these homes was 
really efficient.^ Was either or neither of them.** 
What is the typically efficient home and how are 
we to produce it? What we should all no doubt 
be glad to have is a ready-made standardized effi- 
cient home, that some one else has worked out for 
us. The suggestion brings up all kinds of pleasant 
ideas, rounded corners where the floor joins the 
wainscoting, automatic dishwashers, ways of get- 
ting out the ashes without soiling the carpets or 
our hands, cooperative stores, the builders' last 
word in city flats, some profit-sharing scheme 
started either by the down-trodden working man 
or the high-minded philanthropist, some service- 
by-the-hour bureau from which somebody will 
send us a "born cook." We wait breathless for 
some mail-order house to offer these efficient, 
smooth-running homes ready to ship at so much 
the dozen f. o. b. But we shall wait to little pur- 
pose if we think of the home as a thing of brick 
and mortar, of wood, or steel, or concrete; as a 



24 Increasing Home Efficiency 

convenient container of stoves and chairs and tables 
and beds or any other things that are, as it were, 
of the flesh alone. Like the heart of our bodies, 
the home is really a complicated force-pump by 
means of which the race gets what it needs for its 
life, and the efficiency of the home must be judged 
not by what it contains, but by what it produces 
for the health and advancement of us all. 



CHAPTER III 
The Basis of Efficiency 

WHEN an efficiency expert reorganizes a 
factory, he does not have to deter- 
mine what that factory shall produce. 
Whether it is to make cotton cloth or shoes or hair 
brushes is already decided. His work is to see 
that it furnishes the largest output, of the highest 
quality, at the lowest cost in labor and money and 
supervision possible under the governing circum- 
stances. 

The problem of reorganizing the home on an 
efficiency basis does not differ in principle from 
the problem of reorganizing the factory. The 
community at large has tacitly agreed on what the 
output of the American home shall be, — it must » 
keep the members of the family in a state of body 
and mind and happiness that will make it possible 
for them to work at their highest capacity for the 
greatest number of years; it must give to the com- 
munity children that are well fitted for citizenship 
and equipped to push civilization along; and it 
must turn out this product on an economical ex- 
penditure not of money only, but of brain and 
muscle as well. This stamps as inefficient homes 
with an undue proportion of sickness, homes 

25 



26 Increasing Home Efficiency 

which are inharmonious and unhappy, and homes 
in which the members are engaged in work dis- 
advantageous to the community. And it stamps 
as inefficient the childless home, because however 
inadvertently, the home which does not give to 
the community its complement of children is in- 
efficient. Society has not consciously formulated 
these requirements, but back somewhere in the 
minds of us all is the conviction that homes that 
have not produced these things have not given 
to the community all it has a right to expect of 
them. Indeed, these requirements are so rudi- 
mentary that they will hardly be denied by any 
one, and most intelligent persons will feel that the 
socially efficient home ought to go a great deal 
beyond them. 

As a nation, we have as yet no standards by 
which to measure the amount of muscle necessary 
to run a home efficiently. Certainly we know there 
is a point below which the members of a family 
may not have enough physical energy for the right 
running of their homes. We do not know what this 
minimum is. We know that it varies with the 
amount of mechanical energy used as a substitute 
for human strength, but we. have never yet dis- 
covered how far this process of substitution can 
be carried. We know too that a minimum amount 
of mental energy must go into the efficient running 
of a home. But what this minimum of brains is 
no one has yet determined. In the matter of 
money, however, we have some basis of measure- 
ment. Dr. Robert Coit Chapin, for instance, has 



The Basis of Efficiency 27 

worked out the financial minimum for decent 
living In New York City. He says: 

"Families having between $900 and $1,000 a 
year are able in general to get food enough to keep 
soul and body together, and clothing and shelter 
enough to meet the most urgent demands of de- 
cency." 

Efforts are being made to establish this mini- 
mum for Boston. A cursory and more or less 
superficial Investigation has been made of the 
standard of living in Buffalo, Rochester and cer- 
tain other large cities. The government, in con- 
nection with the Bureau of Education, and the 
Departments of Agriculture and Commerce and 
Labor, has gathered statistics on the cost of living. 
These investigations tend to show that Dr. 
Chapin's minimum of from $900 to $1,000 a year 
is the money limit of decency, not only in New 
York but throughout the country. From these 
studies and from the analysis of family budgets 
which we have collected during the last six years, 
we believe that the money minimum essential to 
efficiency In the average American home is $1,000 
a year. We are therefore eliminating from con- 
sideration In this book all families whose incomes, 
either in money or Its equivalent, are less than 
this, because we are convinced that no supple- 
mental expenditure of brain and muscle can enable 
them to rise to the level of social efficiency. 

This last phrase has been a regular Benjamin 
Franklin's kite to draw thunderbolts. It appears 
that people with incomes of $1,000 or less, bitterly 



28 Increasing Home Efficiency 

resent being classed with the socially inefficient; 
and people who pay wages of less than ^i,ooo 
gnash their epistolary teeth at the imputation of 
grinding the faces of their employes below the 
point of possible efficiency. 

A western college president writes in a state of 
mind. Says he: 

"Dr. Scott Nearing concludes that three-fourths 
of the adult males in the industrial sections of the 
United States earn less than ^600 a year. Accord- 
ing to the last report of the Interstate Commerce 
Commission (even though there is a large percen- 
tage of highly paid manual and salaried workers), 
the average income of the nearly two million rail- 
road employes during the year preceding was $662. 
Most ministers of all denominations receive less 
than $1,000 a year. Shall we conclude that the 
great majority of families in this country cannot 
possibly reach social efficiency?" 

Writes the wife of a United States Civil Service 
employe from Massachusetts: 

"As I finished the ironing and prepared dinner, 
I thought what you said seemed mighty discourag- 
ing. Are discussions of Home Efficiency truly 
broad and helpful when more than half the homes, 
indeed, isn't it many more than half.^ are ruled 
out? If it is a hard job, isn't the manager on $800 
and $1,000 especially entitled to all the assistance 
that home scientists can give? I have never writ- 
ten in reply to anything I ever read before, but 
this did rouse me sol" 

The college president and the employe's wife 



The Basis of Efficiency 29 

are alike in assuming that because so many fam- 
iUes do Hve on incomes below ^1,000, it must be 
possible for them to do It efficiently if somebody 
would only show them how. 

It isn't. 

And $1,200 is more nearly correct than $1,000 
a year as the financial minimum for social effi- 
ciency. 

It seems necessary to go Into definitions. A 
"typical" family Is not just a collection of related 
people living together. It Is a definite number of 
persons having a definite consuming power. The 
International Statistical Congress which met In 
Brussels In 1855 defined it as a father, mother, and 
four children ranging In age from sixteen to two 
years. The typical American family today is 
smaller than this. It consists of five members, 
father, mother, and three children under working 
age. Two people living in a boarding-house, or a 
man and eight children on a farm, or sixty children 
in an orphan asylum, do not, for the purposes of 
economic Inquiry, constitute a family, although 
from the standpoint of sentiment or biology they 
may do so. 

"I support my family, which consists of my 
wife, two children and a servant on $1,100 a year," 
writes a business man, and proceeds to give his 
budget. 

Now If he consulted the servant. It Is probable 
she would think she supported herself quite as 
much as his paid clerks and bookkeepers. A serv- 
ant is not a part of the family In any but a physical 



30 Increasing Home Efficiency 

sense, — she is one of the tools by which the house 
is operated. She is not supported by the family; 
she is paid by the family just as the grocer and 
the butcher are. She accepts board and room as 
part payment for her work. As a basis of inquiry, 
you have to understand what your family is. 

Also you have to know what your income is — it 
may be something more than the amount of money 
that passes through your hands in a year; to that 
must be added the value of the necessaries you 
have without buying them, to say nothing of the 
unpaid services of a wife and growing children. 

A gentleman from Massachusetts is certain that 
his home is efficient though his income is only $900 
a year. He has a wife and three children, and 
sends the following budget: 

Tithes $ 92.00 

Clothing 120.00 

Shoes and rubbers 14.00 

Lectures and entertainment 12.00 

Medical and dental 16.00 

Books, papers and stationery 8.00 

Gifts 12.00 

Groceries and provisions 254.00 

Rent at $14 168.00 

Light and fuel 66.00 

Miscellaneous expense 41.00 

Insurance 37-00 

Cooperative bank 60.00 

$900.00 



The Basis of Efficiency 31 

"A small garden helps to reduce the provision 
account," he says, "and berries for eating and 
canning are to be found for the picking on the hills, 
two miles out of the city." 

Now, according to the estimate of the American 
School of Home Economics, that family requires 
about ^360 a year for food to keep Its members -k 
In good health, and as the doctor's and dentist's 
bills combined amount to only ^16 a year, — in- 
dicating that the family Is sufficiently fed, — It is 
fair to estimate that food to the value of more 
than $100 raised in the garden and gathered on 
the hillside must be added to the ^254's worth 
allowed for in the budget. Another source of 
income is revealed when he says: 

"The children will all work vacations and some 
Saturdays, and will earn enough picking fruit, 
helping In a grocery store, carrying a paper route, 
or by improving several other Important oppor- 
tunities which present themselves, to meet their 
own growing expenses in the line of clothes and 
amusement, as well as to save a little for the 
educational account." 

The "growing expenses" of three children can- 
not well be less than $200. All things considered, 
that family has actual resources considerably 
above $1,200 a year. It's a wise man that knows 
his own income! 

Mr. Edgar writes from Michigan that his family 
lives efficiently on $600 a year. No doubt they 
do live not only efficiently, but greatly to the 
advantage of the community as well. This house 



32 Increasing Home Efficiency 

father modestly gives his account in the third 
person, — when he speaks of "they," he means his 
wife and himself. 

"They had but two children," he writes, "but 
have cared for four boys, who were homeless, 
during a part or all of their unproductive years. 
Their children were college educated; the older 
one, a graduate of three colleges, is now a pro- 
fessor in one of New York's great colleges. Of 
the four boys who felt the influence of their home, 
two have stalwart shoulders to the industrial 
wheels of a great factory. One is an accountant, 
one a floor department manager of a world-wide- 
known mercantile house in Chicago. At three 
different times their little farm has been mort- 
gaged to secure the desired education for their 
children. . . . They have met with their brother 
farmers in club and social gatherings and have im- 
parted something in the spirit of 'Look Up, Lift 
Up.' Their influence is felt by the teachers in 
their country school, and men crooked in politics 
give them a wide berth." 

This is Mr. Edgar's budget: 

Food ^250.00 

Shelter (taxes and insurance) 30.00 

Clothes 75-00 

Operation: 

Light, heat, incidentals $ 50.00 

Furnishing 40.00 90.00 



The Basis of Efficiency 33 

Advancement: 

Church and chanty $ 25.00 

Books, etc 30.00 

For the most good as we see it 100.00 155.00 



$600.00 



Mr. Edgar's record of achievement is the sort 
most of us would be glad to look back upon, but 
it was not made on $600 a year by any means; 
neither has Mr. Edgar at present a normal family 
in the economic sense. 

Taking the last objection first. His family now 
consists of three adults and five guests for a short 
time in summer. As nearly as one can calculate 
from their ages and the government tables, the 
amount spent for food to keep them in health would 
necessarily be about ^400 a year. That is $38 less 
than the normal family requires, and therefore 
reduces their necessary income by that much. But 
the allowance in the budget for food is only $250, 
so that it is fair to suppose that at least $150 worth 
of food is raised on the farm. Indeed, Mr. Edgar 
writes : 

"There is no profit-taking between 'them' and 
the producer for the staples of life." 

This puts their actual at least ^150 above their 
money income. There is no outlay for rent be- 
cause Mr. Edgar owns his farm. It is a little diffi- 
cult to calculate the rental value of such a place, 
but since it produces a yearly surplus of ^600, be- 
sides at least $150 worth of food and probably a 



34 Increasing Home EflSciency 

good deal of fuel in the way of fire-wood, — the 
^50 a year entered in the budget for fuel, light and 
incidentals could not possibly be enough, — it seems 
that ^30 a month is not too high an estimate. At 
least $360 must be added to the given income, 
bringing it up to ^1,110 a year, not counting the 
extra fuel which he does not have to buy. Be- 
sides this, there is the farm itself which represents 
invested capital and is therefore a potential addi- 
tion to the income, as the mortgages for the educa- 
tion of the children show. So that this less than 
normal family has at least the minimum income of 
a normal family — a sufficient financial basis for 
their very evident social efficiency. 

Again, the $1,200 decency minimum which we 
believe is more nearly correct than the $1,000 
minimum, applies only to the United States of 
America and to the present time. In Smyrna, we 
are told, it is possible for a family of five to live 
a year on $157. Twenty-five years ago one could 
live in the United States as comfortably on $500 
a year as he can now on $1,200. A good many 
people write us that because the mother of Abra- 
ham Lincoln brought up so great a son on an al- 
most invisible income, the amount of money one 
has is no measure of one's efficiency. We are not 
considering the exception, but the average, nor 
any time but our own. Not many people bring 
up Abraham Lincolns under the most favorable 
circumstances, but no one knows how many Lin- 
colns society may have missed through lack of food 
and clothes and education. Privations are not as- 



The Basis of Efficiency 35 

sets because some people have succeeded in spite 
of them. 

We must differentiate very carefully between 
being able to survive, and living efficiently; and 
we must also realize that society, and not our- 
selves, is the ultimate judge of whether we are 
living efficiently or not. The Home must submit 
to be judged by its social output. 

Now, being "able to meet the most urgent de- 
mands of decency" does not imply enough for 
efficiency by any means. The investigations of 
Dr. Chapin show that nine per cent of the families 
with incomes between $900 and ^1,100 are under- 
fed, eighteen per cent underclothed, and thirty-six 
per cent overcrowded. The family budgets In our 
possession indicate that a margin of at least ^200 
a year beyond the "demands of decency" is ab- 
solutely required to make the average family effi- 
cient. 

But of course this ^1,200 efficiency minimum 
was established by Dr. Chapin only for New York 
City. Is not the cost of living much less in other 
places .? The investigation of John R. Howard, Jr., 
into the conditions of living of one hundred 
working-men's families In Buffalo shows that, 
except In the matter of rent, the cost of necessaries 
is as high in that city as In New York. And In- 
vestigations into conditions in seven other New 
York State towns and cities, varying In size from 
Rochester, a great manufacturing center, to 
Honeoye Falls, a town so tiny that the train just 
pauses there on occasion, show a significant uni- 



36 Increasing Home Efficiency 

formity except in the matter of rent, which is 
higher in New York than elsewhere, and clothing, 
which costs less in New York City than in most 
other places. 

In 1910 the United States Commissioner of 
Labor published the results of an inquiry into the 
reasons why children leave school to go to work. 
This inquiry covers a number of small manufac- 
turing towns in Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, 
Georgia, and South Carolina, and tends to show 
that the cost of living in these scattered com- 
munities closely parallels that in New York City. 
With the increased price of commodities it is fair 
to assume that families, even in the country and 
small towns, need a minimum income of $1,000 
a year to live in bare decency, although the 
entire income need not be entered in the form of 
cash. 

Lest we should allow ourselves to consider this 
minimum of $1,000 for decency enough to live on 
efficiently also, let us see just what it covers. It 
takes for granted that the family contains no 
children over fourteen; that between $12 and $13 
a year only will be spent for furniture and utensils 
and dishes; that between $15 and $20 will cover 
the charges for doctor, dentist, or oculist; that 
there will be no vacations; that not more than $25 
a year can go into insurance or savings; and that 
from $S to $10 a year must serve for all extra 
education, books, newspapers, stamps and station- 
ery. 

Of course none of us believes that it is for the 



The Basis of Eflficiency 37 

advantage of the community that children should 
go to work as soon as the law allows; and the cost 
of keeping a middle-class child between fourteen 
and sixteen years, as nearly as one can estimate it, 
is ^212 a year. So that one child above fourteen 
kept In school, instead of sent to work, requires 
an extra ^200 above the minimum Income neces- 
sary to keep a family decently alive. Besides, we 
admit that recreation Is to the advantage of us all. 
Let us not fall Into the fallacy of thinking that a 
family can be efficient without It. If vacations are 
good for some of us, why are they not good for the 
rest? On the face of It, a home that provides only 
clothes and food and shelter cannot attend to its 
job, cannot be socially efficient. 

But families do live on less than $1,200 a year In 
many parts of the country? Undoubtedly; but 
they usually sacrifice something from their effi- 
ciency to do it, — something that It would be for 
the advantage of society for them to have. 

"This Is my fourth year of teaching In the high 
school," says a man from an Eastern town of 
about 50,000 inhabitants. "I am receiving a 
salary of $1,000 a year, and at present writing I can 
look forward to a maximum salary of $1,125 ^ 
year. You will notice by my expense account that 
I include $90 for summer school, and that I have 
fallen short In my Income almost exactly that 
amount. This is an absolutely necessary expense 
if I am to be efficient as a teacher. If any teacher 
with a family In this part of the country Is saving 
money, It means that he Is saving what should be 



38 Increasing Home Efficiency 

spent on self-improvement. Of course I could do 
what many teachers are obliged to do, — that is, 
engage in some gainful occupation during my vaca- 
tion, and forego professional improvement, — but 
that would mean stagnation." 

This teacher has chosen between living within 
his $1,000 a year with deterioration into the sort 
of inefficiency that would be reflected by every 
pupil he taught, and carrying a load of debt like 
an old man of the sea to mar his efficiency in an- 
other way. 

A high school principal in the West has chosen 
differently: 

"My salary since married has been $85, $95, 
$110 (for nine months). Our monthly expenses 
average around $50, and we think we are living 
high." He writes: "We have nothing to pay to 
wages, being able-bodied. The laundry for the 
two years' total was $4.17. Neither are we misers, 
as we believe in living good. In 191 1 we spent for 
candy, $5.15; social and church dinners, $7.25; 
olives, $1.80. We buy food in small amounts as 
needed, and my wife is not wasteful. Two is 
cheaper than one. We have a piano and a cozy 
home. So long, till I have time to make up my 
accounts for you." 

This high school principal's accounts show no 
expenditures for books, lectures, or extra study of 
any kind ! He is making a different sacrifice of his 
efficiency from the Eastern teacher, — he is living 
within his income. 

An income below $1,200 a year eliminates 



The Basis of Efficiency 39 

people from many things besides the possibility of 
having efficient homes. It forces them out of pro- 
fessions where they are needed, and sometimes out 
of existence altogether. 

The wife of a teacher now in the Northwest 
writes: 

"My husband is a public school teacher whose 
salary has ranged from $600 to $765 a year. Some- 
times he has been able to earn our summer ex- 
penses, and sometimes not. We became convinced 
that the East held nothing In store for old age ex- 
cept poverty, so determined to come to . 

After paying the moving expenses, we had about 
$400, the result of eleven years of labor." They in- 
vested their savings in a few acres set to young 
apple trees, and, by combining teaching with 
farming, are beginning to make things pay. "In 
two years more," writes this teacher's wife, "our 
trees will bring In an income, and then we hope 
this hand-to-mouth existence will cease." Then 
they are planning to cut out teaching altogether, 
which at present is merely a makeshift to keep the 
pot boiling. "After a lifetime spent as a teacher 
and a teacher's wife," she concludes, "I believe 
that no one can hope to save anything for old age 
in that profession, and, while the sentimentalists 
love to prate of the 'future reward of the faithful 
teacher' and 'the noblest profession on earth,' that 
does not provide his family with the necessaries of 
life." 

A letter In a delicate Spencerlan hand came from 
an Idaho town so small that we have been unable 



40 Increasing Home Efficiency 

to detect it on any available map. It was from a 
man who had been in the Congregational ministry 
on a salary of ^500 a year. 

"Since there was no possible show to lay up a 
few dollars for the rainy day, I left the vocation 
and devoted myself to agriculture, and made good 
in less than ten years. But I had to exert myself 
to do it," he writes. " I cannot make much money, 
but I don't need much. I have a $3,000 house, a 
few cows, about 1 50 chickens, and a couple of good 
horses. The farm brings in $500 a year profit, and 
I and my little family live in comfort. We raise 
almost everything we need, and what few things 
we must buy in groceries and clothes and books 
we can well afford." 

This minister has been eliminated from his pro- 
fession by the inability of his family to subsist on 
$500 a year. 

Here is word from another minister who is in the 
process of elimination. He is trying to live in a 
New England village on a salary of $800 and a 
tumble-down parsonage. 

"I cheerfully agree that I and others should be 
eliminated because of our lack of social efficiency. 
I confess that the thought is not new; I have in- 
deed thought of the river nearby the parsonage — 
but I dislike water in that form. 

"I send my list of living expenses because I am 
not only living on an income below the suggested 
$1,000, but because the balance is on the debit side. 
This debit balance is perhaps a common expe- 
rience among my kind. I dub the mistress of the 



The Basis of Efficiency 41 

manse a * Peculiarly Capable Person/ yet she needs 
help; usually some one who is in need of a tem- 
porary home, or a school-girl working for board, is 
employed. We were trained to enjoy raisins and 
nuts, but are living on baked beans and codfish." 

This minister has no illusions as to his exact 
position in the world and the reasons for it. He 
puts down ^115 a year for heat and light, with 
significant comments on the state of the parsonage 
and the fact that the congregation do not think 
it honorable to incur debt to have it repaired; 
leaves an ominous blank after "advancement," 
and two exclamation points only after "books." 
His budget shows a moderate and well-balanced 
expenditure in which the only possible reductions 
might be the $25 a year he gives to charity and the 
$80 he pays for insurance. The ghastly significant 
thing is the debit balance of ^371. Think of such 
a debt hanging over a man with no other resources 
than an ^800 salary and a tumble-down parson- 
age! How can any minister preach the Gospel 
adequately to a congregation that ignores the fun- 
damental doctrine that the laborer is worthy of his 
hire, and drives its pastor to the verge of suicide.'* 

The air is full of the irrellglon of the times and 
the lack of able men in the ministry. Some proc- 
esses of elimination may be hard to understand, 
but for the explanation of this one we have only 
to look to the Census of 1900, which says: 

The average salary of all ministers of all denomina- 
tions in the United States Is $1,223 for cities over 



42 Increasing Home Efficiency 

300,000 population; $1,1 10 for cities of 100,000; $1,063 
for cities from 50,000 to 100,000; $972 for cities of 
25,000 to 50,000; and $573 for all other places. 

Is any comment needed on that? The facts 
blow their own trumpets. 

A college professor writes that he abhors the 
declaration that we should eliminate from our 
consideration all families with incomes below 
$1,000 a year, because their "social efficiency, con- 
sidered from the standpoint of general usefulness, 
exceeds that of any other class." He asks, with 
consternation, who would perform a whole page 
of useful occupations ranging from preaching in 
our smaller churches to delivering the groceries.^ 
** Eliminate them, and you eliminate society it- 
self 1" he cries in anguish, taking it for granted that 
no man would continue to plow and sow, to weave 
or carry or buy or sell, to teach or preach, if he 
were well paid for it. For what but the great joy 
of poverty should lure a man into such occupa- 
tions .f* That it is conceivable we should have a 
better class of plowmen on $1,200 a year, that a 
well-fed preacher might exemplify the grace of 
God as well as a hungry one, has not occurred to 
this agitated professor; but then he is not in the 
economics department! 

There is another sort of protest against the idea 
that efficiency has any relation to income, which, 
for want of a better name, we call the religious pro- 
test. It usually backs up its own lack of insight by 
quoting the Bible. From many such we select one : 



The Basis of EflBciency 43 

"If society should be Imbued with the spirit of 
Christian brotherhood; should find ways and means 
to enlighten the youth in those families with in- 
comes of less than $1,000 per annum as to the op- 
portunities in life for those who aspire and with 
zeal strive toward perfecting themselves, the truth 
conveyed by the words of Christ, * Blessed are the 
meek: for they shall inherit the earth,' would be 
more obvious than it now appears. ... It seems 
to me that it is wholly wrong to fix a wage as the 
index of possible social efficiency. The spirit of 
hope, the ambition to succeed, may be nourished 
in those families if they grasp the Christ idea of 
hope for better things beyond." 

Why, in the spirit of all that is humane, should 
not "a society imbued with the spirit of Christian 
brotherhood," do something more than cultivate 
hope! Cannot the imaginative mind picture it as 
rolling up its sleeves and throwing the stones of 
not-enough-food, and not-enough-clothes, and not- 
enough-shelter, or enough education or rest or 
amusement, out of the path that leads to attain- 
ment.^ Is there any authority. Biblical or other- 
wise, for substituting hope in the future for food 
in the stomach.^ And why, of all things, should 
these advocates of the Spirit of Brotherhood take 
it for granted that the things necessary to the effi- 
ciency of their own households are not necessary 
for the rest of the race ^ 

As Mr. Frank Tucker, of the New York Provi- 
dent Loan Society, says: 

"Society, which pays the bill for poverty, has 



44 Increasing Home Efficiency 

the right to say whether poverty that is prevent- 
able shall continue to exist. . . . We shall be 
led to inquire the price that society pays when the 
work of women and children is necessary to sup- 
plement the wages of the father. We shall be led 
to inquire the price that society pays when a por- 
tion of it is housed below the standard, is fed below 
the standard, is clothed, is warmed, has its rest 
and pleasures, is protected against sickness and 
accident, below the standard; is ignorant through 
lack of education, because its services are exploited 
for the selfish purposes of others, or because of the 
unenlightened attitude of some who conscien- 
tiously (perhaps) maintain that labor is a com- 
modity to be paid for according to supply and 
demand, without regard to the essentials of a 
normal standard of living and the cost of those 
essentials." 

In reorganizing certain factories the efficiency 
experts have found that better conditions in the 
way of light, comfort, sanitation, and shorter 
hours result in an increased output. The social 
output of the home can be increased in the same 
way only by increasing the income of the wage- 
earners, teachers, preachers, civil service employes, 
to the level of a "normal standard of living." 

We have no wish to discourage the energetic, 
conscientous housewife who is valiantly trying to 
make the best of less than enough for social effi- 
ciency; far from it. We do want to make her lift 
up her eyes from the narrow round of petty striv- 
ings that mean individual survival only, to the 



The Basis of Efficiency 45 

wider strivings that mean progress for all. Yes- 
terday, when the menace of famine was on every 
hand, it was a triumph to keep alive. Today we 
have learned as a race to produce more than enough 
for bare existence; we have attained what Pro- 
fessor Simon Patten, of the University of Penn- 
sylvania, describes as the civilization of a surplus. 
The great duty of our generation is the wise dis- 
tribution of this surplus. Our triumph must be 
the elevation of the entire race to a worthy plane 
of living. And this we shall not accomplish until 
a righteous discontent enters Into the hearts of the 
democratic masses, until they demand for them- 
selves and their children, not survival only, but 
the nobler advantages of a spiritually enlightened 
civilization. Is It not flying In the face of Provi- 
dence to remain satisfied with less than enough 
for social efliclency In a world blessed with plenty.^ 



CHAPTER IV 
Chance vs. The Budget 

UP in the attic of grandfather's farm house, 
packed between the barege dresses, deep 
brimmed bonnets and folded wedding 
gowns in which we children used to masquerade 
whenever we could elude our vigilant aunts, was 
an old account book. It had been kept by great- 
great-Aunt Serepta, whose husband was a revolu- 
tionary soldier, and was a marvel of accounting, 
although the shillings and pence, and the queer 
"s's" which looked like "fs" made it hard to 
decipher. There is a family tradition of Aunt 
Serepta's good housekeeping, her frugality and 
neatness, and some of the linen which she wove 
and marked with her initials in delicate cross- 
stitch is now on our own table. Aunt Serepta was 
the perfect housekeeper of her time. 

And there is another set of account books in 
our possession — books kept twenty-five years ago 
which are complete records of the family costs 
down to the mending of the harness and the var- 
nishing of the carriage. Like great-great-Aunt 
Serepta, the maker of these books knew where 
every dollar had gone — afterward. 

Most of us have inherited the idea that this 
same sort of historical record of the family dis- 
bursements is all that can be expected of us. We 

46 



Chance vs. The Budget 47 

do not realize that since those days of detached ' 
business men, whose incomes depended on their 
own enterprise and exertion, times have changed; 
that we are — most of us — living on salaries or in- 
comes which are about as elastic as New Bedford 
granite, and that only by deciding beforehand 
just what proportion shall be eaten and worn, 
lived in and burned up, can we avoid the rough 
edges of bankruptcy and carry our families se- 
curely toward their particular goals. 

We do not want the same things out of life; 
some of us do not care to be pillars of society but 
long to go about "for to admire and for to see," 
and the few who have learned to plan beforehand, 
how to keep house on the budget system, seem to 
be attaining their diverse ends more successfully 
than the rest of us, for the simple reason that a 
family budget is the most effective instrument in 
the efficient running of a household. It is to the 
housekeeper what a set of blue prints is to the 
builder. 

The family needs fall naturally into five divl- ^ 
sions. Beginning in the order of necessity, they/ / 
are: food; shelter; clothing; operating costs, which 
include heat, light, furnishing, repairs, service and 
general running expenses; all the diverse needs 
which it Is hard to label, such as education, savings, 
recreation and the pleasures which make for social 
advancement; and incidentals. To make a family 
budget along these lines is still unusual, but it is 
by no means unknown,— the measure of our civil- 
ization is the distance we plan ahead.' 



48 Increasing Home Efficiency 

The Millars, a family living in a New York sub- 
urb on a salary of ^3,000 a year, have worked 
out a budget fitted to their particular needs. 

"What a hard time I've had,'' Mrs. Millar says, 
"to learn that it isn't by tight-lacing the dollar 
bill that one is comfortable, but by making one's 
needs an easy fit to one's income! For sometimes, 
no matter if I'd scraped the soup bones and boiled 
the coffee grounds twice, I never knew, even after 
rd seen the bills, whether I hadn't spent more 
than I ought to have spent. 

"And just think," she went on, "when I was 
first married, I began by bucking the accepted 
fallacy that it is cheaper to own your own home 
than to pay rent! I've kept the advertisement 
which lured us into it as a reminder." 

She opened her account book and there it was, 
pasted in the debit column. 

"Tasteful, commodious and well-built House, beauti- 
fully situated, in Montrose; 34x36 feet in Dimensions, 
Eight Rooms; attic has space for one or more additional 
rooms. Lot 150x150. Less than Five Minutes' Walk 
from the Montrose Station of the Erie Railroad. Com- 
manding view. Elevation about 100 feet above tide 
water. Locality Healthful. Streets Macadamized and 
lighted by Electricity. Property restricted. Running 
Water, Modern Plumbing; Furnace and Range; bath- 
room; stationary Yorkshire Tubs. 

"Price $6,000. Small Cash Payment. Balance on 
Bond and Mortgage. 

"Price subject to change without notice." 



Chance vs. The Budget 49 

"That was what caught us: Trice subject to 
change without notice.' We saw it soaring like a 
bird, snatched at it, and caught it on the fly! We 
thought we'd be better citizens if we owned our 
own home, and I had read a book on housekeeping 
which assured me that one could safely spend 
one-fifth of one's income on rent. But if we only 
spent one-sixth, that would be ^500, and we fig- 
ured that the interest on the ^6,000 we owed on the 
house would be $140 a year less than that, and that 
we'd gradually pay ofl" the mortgage out of the 
money we'd saved. Not until we had moved in 
and settled did I sit down with pencil and paper to 
find out just how soon it could be paid for. Then 
I discovered that if we waited until we got all the 
$6,000 together, it would take forty-two years 
and 3i2f days, exactly; and that if we paid some 
on it every five years, it would take twenty-three 
years and nearly 308 days; but that by reducing it 
every year, we could get all but $8.02 paid in 
twenty years. I never figured out how long it would 
take us to pay that $8.02, but I found that it wasn't 
just paying the mortgage that ran up the cost. 

"We picked out the house with reference to the 
view of New York twinkling like a diamond neck- 
lace in the distance and the sort of people we 
thought would be living next door; but we hadn't 
noticed that the mahogany finish and white enamel 
paint and the mirrors we liked so much really 
needed two servants to keep them clean. Two 
servants would mean $600 a year. I saw that I'd 
have to be the other servant. Next we found 



50 Increasing Home Efficiency 

that we couldn't afford to give pretty little dinners, 
nor have things in the chafing dish when people 
dropped in, nor do any of the things we had 
planned when we bought the house. It was only 
useful to eat and sleep in. 

"And then Jane was born. We were so happy 
that I think John would have hemmed her little 
flannel jackets himself, if he had known how. We 
never thought of her as a financial responsibility, 
but there was a lump sum of a hundred dollars to 
Dr. Arnold, and I understand now that he must 
have given us reduced rates, because he knew 
John; the trained nurse cost twenty-five dollars a 
week for three weeks, and the price of those same 
little flannel jackets ran the whole cost up to some- 
thing like three hundred dollars. Of course I 
hired a nurse-maid. I took it for granted that she 
was as much a part of a baby as coats and trousers 
are of a boy; but after the first month I discharged 
her. I found she cost just eighteen dollars a month 
that I didn't have. But you notice that I hired 
her first and found out afterward that I couldn't 
afford her. 

"I began to see that just paying the bills after 
the things are bought doesn't fit the modern situ- 
ation at all. You've got to know beforehand, 
because a salary of three thousand dollars will 
not stretch to order. There was nothing John or 
^ I could do to earn any more money, and if we 
wanted more things, it was up to me to manage 
so we could get them. It was necessary to know 
just where I could turn if I needed an extra, where 



Chance vs. The Budget 



SI 



the budget could be squeezed, and where it was 
likely to expand without warning. And, more- 
over, I had to keep things in proportion. So I 
began to live on a budget, and it has picked more 
thorns from our pathway than any unknown un- 
cle who ever left a fortune to his relatives. I based 
my estimates on past experience and I apportioned 
our income as follows: 

Mrs. Millar's Monthly Budget 

(Father, mother and three children.) 

Annual income, ^3,000. Monthly income, ^250. 

By per cent 

Rent $50.00 20 % 

Food 70.00 

Heat and light 7.50 

Clothes 43.34 

Insurance, savings, church 20.00 



4.16 

2.52 



28 

3 

17-336 
8 

1.664 
1.008 



Carfare 

Dr. and dentist 

Laundry (John's) per week 62c. 
4 shirts with attached cuffs 

7 collars 2.48 .992 

Recreation: 

Club dues (Mrs. M.) $10 per 
year; children's dancing school, 
$20 per year; books, papers, 

theaters, etc lo.oo 4 

Repairs and replenishing 10.00 4 

Lunches (John) i5-00 6 

Help 15.00 6 



$250.00 100 % 



52 Increasing Home Eflficieney 

"I don't think my table has the self-denying 
flavor which clings about the eating of beef-heart 
and fish. There are six to feed now, counting the 
maid, though William doesn't do much but run 
up the milk bill — bless him!" 

Mrs. Millar's Daily Food Budget 

(Mr. Millar, Mrs. Millar, three children and 
a maid.) 

Meat, 3 lbs. at 20c $ .60 

Bread, 2 loaves, made at home .16 

Cereal and rice or macaroni .05 

Vegetables .25 

Butter .15 

Fruit .30 

Coffee (4 lbs. a month at 30c.) $1.20 

Tea (K lb. a month at 70c.) 35 

Cocoa (twice a week instead of milk) . . . .20 
Sugar, 18 lbs. at 6c 1.08 

$2.83 .09 

Eggs .20 

Milk (2 qts. at lOc, i pt. cream at 12c.) .32 

Desserts, cheese, condiments, pickles. . . . .20 

$2.32 

The three pounds of meat a day which Mrs. Mil- 
lar bought were distributed through the week 
about as follows: 



Chance vs. The Budget 53 

Roast of beef (6 lbs. at 26c., 



2 dinners) $1 



Sirloin steak (2 lbs. at 26c.) 

Fish (3 lbs. at loc.) 

Fowl (2J/2 lbs. at 21C.) 

Cutlet (2 lbs. at 20c.) 

Ham (2 lbs. at 22c.) 

Soup meat at 9c 



56 

52 
30 
74 
40 

44 

36 



$4.32 
Her daily expenditure for meat 

being 61 5-7 cents. 

In the weeks when she bought a mutton or pork 
roast instead of beef, her expenses would drop a 
little below her allowance. 

"I pay Mary $15 a month and board," resumed 
Mrs. Millar. "She's just the sort of prehistoric 
drudge to be satisfied with the isolation and the 
pay. She can't speak English, but she can clean 
and wash and bake bread and is too homely to 
marry the butcher. One of the hardest things I 
have to do is to keep my light and heat bill down 
to $250 a year, for there's no way of keeping tab 
on how much I'm using, if it is gas; and I must 
keep the house warm and cook the food, no matter 
how much coal it takes. 

"John has to have a chop or a slice of roast and 
vegetables for lunch, and he needs the rest which 
comes from eating in a comparatively quiet place, 
so, with the tip, he rarely gets off with less than 
sixty cents; $15 a month he counts his luncheons. 



54 Increasing Home Efficiency 

Here is John's personal budget. He isn't a ready- 
made man, but he's had to get himself stand- 
ardized. 



Mr. Millar's Clothes Budget 

2 suits at $45.00 $ 90.00 

2 extra trousers at $8.00 16.00 

2 hats at $3.00 6.00 

3 prs. shoes at $5.00 15.00 

6 shirts at $1.50 9.00 

Overcoat 35-00 

2 suits winter underwear at $2.00 4.00 

2 suits summer underwear at $1.00 2.00 

12 socks at 25c 3.00 

Ties, gloves, collars, etc 10.00 

$190.00 

"Of course he doesn't need a new overcoat 
every year, but there is always something to take 
its place; new evening clothes every few years, 
or a frock- or a rain-coat, or new flannels, or some- 
thing. John has to have clothes up to a certain 
grade as a business proposition. There is a cash 
value in the cut of his shoes and in his being able to 
invite a man out to lunch. 

"My own clothes' budget runs like this: 



Chance vs. The Budget 55 



Mrs. Millar^s Own Clothes 

Tailor suit (made after the season) $ 50.OO 

Waist to match 12.00 

4 shirt-waists at $1.50 6.00 

Fancy white waist 5.00 

2 prs. street shoes at $5.00 lo.oo 

Pr. house slippers 2.00 

Pr. dress shoes 5.00 

Pr. rubbers .75 

White duck skirt 6.00 

Muslin dress lo.oo 

Silk petticoat 5.00 

House dress (made at home) 10.00 

Half evening dress (worn two years) 25.00 

2 hats at ^8.00 16.00 

Pr. evening gloves 2.00 

Pr. silk gloves 1. 00 

2 prs. street gloves at ^1.50 3.00 

Stockings, material for underwear (made at 

home), ruchings, veils, etc 11.25 

$180.00 

"I learned to buy out of season and stick to one 
or two colors. By having my tailor suits made in 
the slack season, I get $75 ones for $50; and $15 
hats marked down to $y. There is a lot in never 
wearing your street suits or gowns in the house, 
and I learned to pick up at sales pretty house 
slippers and ready-made muslins to wear evenings. 
I manage to dress the children for $150 a year — 



56 Increasing Home Efficiency 

$70 for Jane, $50 for John, Jr., and ^20 for William, 
with $10 ^scattering.' 

*'I never want to feel again the sensation of curl- 
ing up my toes inside my shoes when the financial 
automobile slews around a corner. I'm content 
to go slow and get back a little of the blessed se- 
curity of my childhood when I didn't know there 
was such a beast as Financial Anxiety. And I 
know that if I hadn't learned to live within a budg- 
et, I might be breaking Jane in as a second house- 
maid instead of planning to introduce her into 
society. 

"Mr. MIcawber was right. Do you remember 
what he said ? 

"* Annual income twenty pounds; annual ex- 
penditure nineteen pounds, nineteen shillings and 
six — result, happiness! Annual income twenty 
pounds; annual expenditure twenty pounds, ought 
and six — result, misery!'" 

But Mrs. Avon living in the center of a North 
Dakota wheat ranch, and Mrs. Fairfax Randolph 
of the trucking section of Virginia, and all the 
other people living on the capricious incomes from 
the soil will probably say: 

"This budget-making is all right if you are living 
on a salary, but it doesn't work when you depend 
on a farm." 

Yes it does! 

A telephone bell was ringing in the front hall, 
the postman's wagon came ambling up the road, a 
rasped trolley wire hummed warningly below the 
hill, a succession of automobiles whisked by — and 



Chance vs. The Budget 57 

we were in the very heart of the farming district 
of western New York, where Mr. and Mrs. Elbert 
Lewis live in financial security on a budget — with 
a steadily swelling surplus. Two things had 
brought the surplus about — on Mr. Lewis's part, 
the adoption of scientific methods of agriculture, 
which reduced to a minimum the tyranny of para- / 
sites and weather; and on that of Mrs. Lewis, the ^ 
scientific management of the household, which she 
runs within a budget as carefully laid out as that 
of any billion dollar corporation, and as strictly ad- 
heres to. 

"I came to my budget in the most natural way," 
said Mrs. Lewis. "I had kept expense accounts 
in an unsystematic fashion for three years, and 
though Elbert worked hard, and I tried to be 
economical, it looked as though we were headed 
straight for a mortgage. To be sure, the farm had 
cleared an annual average of ^1,800 — enough to 
live and save on — but the fluctuations from year 
to year had been so unreasonable that we never 
could reckon on our income with any certainty. 
We had followed piously in the footsteps of father 
Lewis, whose staple crop had always been wheat, 
with enough corn for his horses, and some rye and 
barley as incidentals. Hadn't he been a prosperous 
farmer.^ But he flourished in the days before the 
fresh fields of the Dakotas and Canada had cap- 
tured the market — his prices didn't depend upon 
the size of their competing crops. Somehow, we'd 
got to get out of the range of their competition, 
we'd got to take advantage of our eastern location 



58 Increasing Home EiBBciency 

and our nearness to the city markets, and, in- 
cidentally, we'd got to circumvent chance and keep 
our income steady. This was Elbert's part of our 
problem, and he's been solving it by balancing the 
crops against each other, so that no matter what 
sort of a season comes, we have a good yield of 
something, and the fluctuations in our income are 
all on the safe side of $1,800." 

Here is the list of their net profits for 1909: 

Wheat $150.94 

Potatoes 1 10.00 

Apples 255.33 

Beans 44975 

Miscellaneous garden stuff 140.64 

Sheep 30475 

Poultry 78.32 

Cows and milk 239.21 

Fat stock 140.64 

Total $1,869.58 

"As you see, the potatoes went back on us; but 
then the apples and the beans did splendidly. We 
raised corn for the stock only. Next year we shall 
probably put clover or some other forage crop in 
place of the potatoes. Or if the market indications 
are good, we may put some acres to onions. We've 
got things fixed like a teeter-board — one side can't 
go down without the other going up. If the lambs 
drop short in March, or June goes dry, or there 
are extra doctor bills, we are not scared blue by the 
growl of the wolf at the door. 



Chance vs. The Budget 59 

"Unless Elbert had been able to establish a rea- 
sonably steady Income/' Mrs. Lewis went on in- 
tently, "I could never have done my end of the 
job — which is to plan our expenses beforehand 
and to run the home within my estimates on a busi- 
ness basis so as to get the utmost for our money. 
I don't like to throw dice with nature. I tried that 
nerve-racking pastime before I devised a budget. 
I used to figure my expenditures on the basis of 
what the crop had brought the year before. If 
we had come short, I scrimped; and if we had had 
a bumper crop, I plunged. We didn't get the cu- 
mulative value of the money we spent; we started 
and stopped like an old-time engine. Now we run 
on this schedule: 

Farm: 150 acres. Average Net Income, $1,800. 
Family: Father, Mother, Margaret. Two 
Hired Men and a Maid in Summer — None in 
Winter. 

Budget Actual In 

as planned expenses per cent 

Groceries $ loo.oo $ 81.60 4.36+% 

Meat 20.00 10.09 -54+ " 

Medical aid 25.00 26.70 .14+" 

Church 15.00 15.79 .84+" 

Hired men 280.00 280.60 14.98+ " 

Hired girl 62.00 41-52 2.22+" 

Clothes; 

Elbert 70.00 36.60 1.96-f " 

Grace 75-oo 67.40 3.60+ " 

Margaret (age 2) 25.00 26.95 1-44+ " 

Refurnishing 80.00 79-29 4.24+ " 

Amusements 20.00 19.80 1.05+ " 



6o Increasing Home Efficiency 

Budget Actual In 

Insurance: as planned expenses per cent 

Fire $ 33-8o $ 33.80 1.88+ % 

Life 95.00 95.00 5.08+ " 

Running expenses 100.00 123.50 6.65+ " 

Taxes 48.00 48.00 2.56+ " 

Magazines and papers. 24.00 24.00 1.28+ " 

Books 15.00 22.00 1.174- " 

Postage and express 16.00 19.80 1.05+ " 

Vacation trip 100.00 113.25 6.05+" 

Club dues 20.00 20.00 1.07+ " 

Charity 25.00 25.00 1.34+ " 

Christmas gifts 40.00 45.00 2.46+ " 

Margaret's bank account 25.00 25.00 1.34+ " 

Improvements to place 15.00 16.80 .98+ " 

Coal 120.00 120.00 6.42+" 

Miscellaneous 51.00 49-98 2.66+ " 

Total $1,499.80 $1,466.87 

Estimated income 1,800.00 

Actual income 1,869.58 

Estimated savings $ 300.20 

Actual savings $ 402.71 21.54+% 

We put a doubting finger on the ^91.69 charged 
to groceries and meat. "This," said we, "is a 
mistake." 

"No," she said, with an air of superb assurance, 
"it's good management." 

When meat, propelled by the tender hands of 
the interests, registered its gentle upward curve, 
Mrs. Lewis considered with some feeling what was 
likely to happen to the savings allowance in her 
budget. So she made a little every-man-his-own- 
packer agreement with Elbert, and re-opened the 



Chance vs. The Budget 6i 

smoke-house on the edge of the orchard that 
Mrs. Lewis, Sr., had abandoned twenty years be- 
fore. They began to use their own fresh beef, mut- 
ton and pork in winter, and corned and smoked 
and salted down a supply for summer. With these 
meats and eggs and chickens, they got satisfacto- 
rily through last year from November to April 
without buying any meat, and even last summer, 
when they had two men and a hired girl, they 
bought meat only twice a week. 

"I don't pretend," said Mrs. Lewis, "that the 
meat we kill ourselves and eat without having it 
hung in cold storage is either as delicious or as 
tender as that we used to get from Chicago; but 
that is a luxury of civilization which I can only get 
by tipping the ice companies, the railroads, and 
the meat trust, in addition to paying their legiti- 
mate profits. Some day we'll own them or put 
them on a maximum wage, so that they'll do what 
they're paid for and we can attend strictly to our 
own special business. Until then we've simply got 
to make the very most of what we have." 

It is Mrs. Lewis's keen mind that substitutes 
fresh vegetables and souffles and salads for the 
"wholesome, plain diet and good old-fashioned 
cooking" of Grandmother Lewis's day. In her 
garden, the beet, the carrot, the turnip, and the 
onion form only a remote background, against 
which shines the "Great White Butter Lettuce," 
recommended by the seed books, every leaf of 
which curls by nature into a little cup to hold 
French dressing. There are Brussels sprouts like 



62 Increasing Home Eflfieiency 

luscious green beads on their stiff stalks, artichokes 
ready for the boiling, and asparagus thrusting up 
green fingers to be grasped. Peas and beans are 
planted every two weeks so as to furnish a per- 
petually fresh crop while the season lasts; and no 
one ever tasted such melons as those from the 
sunny slope below the wood lot, nor such grapes 
as are left on the vines till just before the frost. 

"You see, vegetables which cost so much in the 
city are no harder than any other sort to raise,'' 
she explained. "It isn't half so hard to make 
French pastries as doughnuts, and I like them 
better. Only, to set a varied table, keeps your 
imagination working overtime." 

Living within a budget is the answer of a clever, 
well-trained woman to the problem of rural isola- 
tion, uncertainty, and debt. The simple solution 
of Grace Lewis is to take business methods over 
into agriculture and home management; to take 
the fewest risks for the biggest returns; to cut down 
the middleman's profits to the utmost; to have a 
large, steadily growing junk-heap on which to 
throw every tradition or method that begins to 
creak at the joints; and to gear up to a new speed- 
limit, where the methods of a certified public ac- 
countant are applied to the raising of cabbages, 
and double-entry bookkeeping keeps tab on the 
syrup that Elbert eats on his griddle-cakes. 

In the hither side of Nebraska, surrounded by 
German and Norwegian immigrants, live an 
American farmer and his wife, who are running 
their farm on the same business methods by which 



Chance vs. The Budget 63 

the city of Milwaukee ran Its affairs under the 
SociaHst administration. That is, at the beginning 
of each year they arrange a budget of their esti- 
mated expenses, determining beforehand not only 
how their income is to be spent, but just what 
that income must be. 

David and Elizabeth Eaton began their house- 
keeping with no more definite plan than to work 
hard, spend little and pay off the mortgage on their 
farm. It was only after their second child came 
that Mrs. Eaton got a clear view of their situa- 
tion. She was trying to build without her blue- 
prints. 

"As I lay looking at Enid's little soft head on 
the pillow beside me," she said, "I saw her grown 
up to a slender girl, and I thought of the pretty 
clothes I would give her and the good times she 
should have. I was just wavering between sending 
her to Vassar or Wisconsin, when I happened to 
ask myself how I knew what we would be able to 
do when she was eighteen, or ten, or what indeed 
we were able to do at that very moment. Wasn't it 
just as probable that I should have to put my 
daughter out to service as that I could send her to 
college.^ So far David and I had been just happy 
and industrious and had let it go at that; I began 
to see that we must be businesslike as well." 

That was nine years ago. Since then Mrs. 
Eaton has so systematized the income and outgo 
of the farm that when her third child was born, 
less than a year ago, she could have told how many 
neckties he could have at fifteen. Not a shoe 



64 Increasing Home Efficiency 

factory manager in all New England knows better 
the profits on Oxford ties than Elizabeth Eaton 
knows the profits on her husband's corn crop of 
191 2. She knows her financial position to the 
point of deciding whether it is wise for her to buy 
a new rubber rattle for the baby or not. 

The only definite figures Mrs. Eaton had when 
she decided to begin her business system were the 
interest on the mortgage and the taxes on their 
land. She proceeded to add to them other charges 
which she considered just as imperative — the cost 
of giving her family what they ought to have to 
make them the sort of people they ought to be. 
She put herself in the position of a board of mana- 
gers, decided upon her plans and then looked about 
for her capital. It was as though she sat down and 
cut out an ample dress pattern, allowing for the 
cloth to shrink and the child to grow, and then 
demanded material enough to make it without 
scrimping and without waste. She found that a 
pleasant, easy-fitting pattern for her family life 
could be cut out of ^2,000 a year. Two thousand 
a year is what she required her husband to earn. 
Then she apportioned her resources so as to enable 
her to put her plans into effect. 

This is her budget, worked out through a series 
of years, during which she ran into great boulders 
of unexpected expenses that had to be got over, 
sloughs where she just could not drag enough out 
of the soil to meet the bills, and barren spots 
where, having spent her income foolishly, she had 
to scrape along on nothing: 



Chance vs. The Budget 65 

Nebraska Farm Budget 

Farm 160 acres. Income ^2,000 a year. 
Family: father, mother and three children. 

Mortgage: In per cent 

Interest $ 360.00 18 % 

Principal (payment on) 300.00 15 " 

Operating Expenses: 

Taxes 3i-20 1.56 " 

Wages (man — 6 months at^^30.oo) 180.00 9 " 

woman( — 26 weeks at ^4.00) . . 104.00 5.2 " 

Refurnishing 50.00 2.5 " 

Running Expenses: 

Fuel, Light, Repairs, etc.. . . 198.00 9.9 " 

Clothes: 

David 70.00 3.5 " 

Mrs. Eaton 90.00 4.5 " 

Junior (aged 12) 40.00 2 " 

Enid (aged 9) 30.00 1.5 " 

Baby Louie (aged 10 months) 10.00 .5 " 

Food: 

Groceries 120.00 6 " 

Meat 40.00 2 " 

Fruit 25.00 1.25 " 

Insurance: 

Fire 40.00 2 " 

Life (Mr. & Mrs. Eaton) 120.00 6 " 

Health 35-oo 1.75 " 

Club dues (Mrs. Eaton) 10.00 .5 " 

Books, papers, magazines 30.00 1.5 " 

Sundries 116.80 5.81 " 

$2,000.00 100 % 



66 Increasing Home Eflficiency 

Of course, to some of the city-bound, it may seem 
that it is worth more than $2,000 a year not to 
live in Nebraska, where you can't always buy what 
you want with your money after you have it; but 
to Mrs. Eaton, creating the things she is going to 
buy is the most interesting part of her work. It is 
like playing Robinson Crusoe, and take it by and 
large, R. C. had a pretty good time. He had a 
wonderful chance to grow up with the country, 
and could choose between adapting himself to his 
environment, like a dandelion, and sinking to the 
mental level of his man Friday; or pulling the 
whole desert island up to his grade of civilization. 
It is the same thing that General Gorgas did in 
forcing Anglo-Saxon sanitation on Spanish Havana 
and exactly what Mrs. Eaton is doing in pushing 
the peasantry of her part of Nebraska out into 
the stream of American advancement. 

For the things that a highly civilized, foresighted 
woman like Mrs. Eaton demands of life are not just 
the food and drink and clothes and shelter that any 
one State can supply; they are the intangible neces- 
sities. She would as soon think of going without her 
monthly magazine as without her shoes, and if cir- 
cumstances presume to step in between her and her 
acquired needs — why, it is a dangerous position for 
circumstances that care about self-preservation! 

"There must be somebody for me to neighbor 
with," she writes. "Not just to run out and bor- 
row a drawing of tea from, as our grandmothers 
would have said, but some one to help me pass the 
change of life back and forth; to talk over the new 



Chance vs. The Budget 67 

sleeves as they are understood in Nebraska, and 
the county fair and the neighbor's children — to 
gossip with, if you like to call it that. These little 
social scallops break the straight edge of life; 
they're for the health of my soul and David's, too. 
You may not see how talk about the fashions will 
help David, but it is all part of my effort to keep a 
sort of newness in our lives, even if we have been 
married fourteen years and have three children. 
I have an awful dread of the silence that has fallen 
between some of the married people I know. It 
isn't that they have quarreled or even had any mis- 
understanding. Life has just slid onto a dull gray 
plain, where each of them knows everything the 
other one knows and there's nothing to talk about. 
I will have something to say to David even if it's 
only that Mrs. Olsen's Plymouth Rocks are laying 
better than my white Wyandottes. So I am allow- 
ing myself real money out of the little we have and 
time out of my busy life to make things happen 
in the way of clubs and institutes and cooperative 
enterprises that a tired farmer and his tired wife 
can get rested in talking about." 

The Eatons have fixed a minimum income — 
which must be the basis of budget building — 
with as much certainty as anything can be fixed in 
this capricious world; they have proved that farm- 
ing can be standardized like any other business, 
and that taking a number of years together, so 
much land plus so much seed, fertilizer, work, and 
brains will produce such and such an income. It 
is almost as sure as Government bonds. 



68 Increasing Home Eflficiency 

Out on the Pacific Coast is a young couple try- 
ing to keep safely between the hedges which shut 
out the sea of debt on the one hand and the crags 
of killing hard work on the other. 

Mr. Allison is a teacher — a good one, in a good 
school, with a salary of ^i,8oo a year. He has be- 
fore him the possibility of a college position and 
the probability of a long and useful life, with plenty 
of work so long as he is able to do it. Mrs. Allison 
brews and bakes, and sews and gardens, and runs 
the whirligig of her little household in accord with 
the dancing of the happy world about the sun. 
The real life of the Allisons is before them — intel- 
lectual achievement, children, the chance to push 
the race ahead. But their financial outlook is very 
limited, for the average pay of the men teachers 
in the United States is not large, and only a few 
college positions go into the thousands. Neither 
Mr. nor Mrs. Allison has any illusion about fortu- 
nate speculation, or a specially created "chair" in 
a university with a vast salary. They believe that 
their prosperity depends on what they can save 
out of their small but reasonably certain income. 

Now, Mrs. Allison has a lot of business sense, 
and she began her housekeeping by organizing 
it on the basis of the least that they could effi- 
ciently live on, put their expenses almost at the 
level of subsistence, as you may say, and then 
made every outlay beyond that tell for their busi- 
ness and social advantage. Mrs. Allison didn't 
begin the budget plan consciously, but her system 
of accounting developed naturally into a habit of 



Chance vs. The Budget 69 

forecasting her expenses, and that grew into the 
carefully planned schedule that follows: 

Mrs. Allison^ s Budget 

Income: ^1,800 ^150.00 a month 

Location: California Occupation: Teacher 

Family: Husband and wife 

Per 
Month 
Mortgage on house. ... $ 30.00 

Carfare 5.85 

Food 18.00 

Wages 4.95 

Gas 1.95 

Electricity 1.50 

Laundry 1.20 

Clothes 18.75 

Telephone 1.95 

Insurance 7.65 

Church .90 

Books, etc 5.40 

Amusements 4.20 

Incidentals 4.20 

Savings 43.50 



Per 


By 


Year 


per cent 


$ 360.00 


20 


70.20 


3-9 


216.00 


12 


59.40 


3-3 


23.40 


1.3 


18.00 


I 


14.40 


.8 


225.00 


12.5 


23.40 


1.3 


91.80 


5-1 


10.80 


.6 


64.80 


3.6 


50.40 


2.8 


50.40 


2.8 


522.00 


29 



$150.00 $1,800.00 100 

Mrs. Allison presents her problem and its solu- 
tion in a letter which runs, in part: 

"People having only $1,200 a year could live as well 
as we do; but, you see, we want to pay for our house, 
and are saving money for that. We thought it wise to 



70 Increasing Home Efficiency 

build because, aside from living in the kind of house 
and location which we like, we have our rent; and when 
we want to sell, we expect to make about fifty per cent 
on our money invested. Of course, this Is very unusual; 
but we bought our lot about three years ago, when 
property was much lower, and in what has proved to 
be a very good location. Generally speaking, here in 
California, we expect to at least come out even in 
owning a house. 

"Literally our income should be stated as * eighteen 
hundred a year — and a garden.' That shows out es- 
pecially when you notice that here, in this land of high 
meats, I need only allow $i8 a month for my table. 
We eat a great deal of fruit and vegetables, both of 
which we raise; in fact, aside from potatoes, we do not 
buy more than five cents' worth of vegetables a day. 
I seldom buy any fruit except berries. I absent- 
mindedly forgot to have berry-bushes planted in our 
garden at first, and the ones we put in later won't bear 
for another year. But buying berries isn't a great ex- 
pense here, for boxes holding enough for two dishes sell 
for five cents in the season — sometimes three for ten 
cents. We always have peaches, plums, apricots, 
oranges and pears in abundance, and we have a big 
apple tree in the back yard. I never have to buy fruit 
to can, for out of my garden I put up more than we 
need. I think one reason living costs so much is that 
people think they must have what they want to eat 
regardless of cost; they buy things out of season, and 
fancy canned goods because it is easier than preparing 
fresh food at home. 

"My regular milk bill is $1.50 a month; that is for 



Chance vs. The Budget 71 

one pint of Jersey milk a day; and then I buy a little 
cream extra. But we do not drink coffee, and, unless 
we have company, our milk gives enough cream for 
our breakfast food, and for desserts. Ice costs five 
cents a day for the seven or eight months in the year 
when we need it. The rate here Is 40 cents a hundred 
pounds, and my Ice-chest Is a dandy. Henry made it, 
otherwise we might need more ice. We live simply 
because Henry does not care for fancy cooking. 

"Servants are hard to get here, and they are mostly 
Chinese when you do get them. They get ^30 to $4.0 
a month, and that does not Include laundry work. I 
can't afford one at that rate, and besides I feel sure it 
would cost us fully as much again for food, and maybe 
more. You know I was brought up to waste nothing. 
I do have a woman come in to wash and clean at 
25 cents an hour. I plan to have her half a day a week, 
but usually It is a little more, and I count on nearly 
five dollars a month for that. I send Henry's collars 
and cuffs to the laundry, and all the "flat work" be- 
sides; sheets, table-cloths, pillow-slips and the like — 
all except the embroideries, which I do myself. But it 
is cheaper to have our underwear and my dresses and 
shirt-waists done at home. 

"We allow ourselves $225 a year for clothes, and 
mine cost twice as much as Henry's. He keeps a 
couple of good tailor-made suits going all the time, but 
he is very careful of them, and has them cleaned and 
pressed often. He wears a lot of clean linen, and we 
have been fortunate In getting his shirts at sales, some- 
times getting $1.50 and $2.50 shirts for 75 cents. I am 
careful of my things too. I never pretend to get a meal 



72 Increasing Home Efficiency 

In a street suit. If I have been out and come In just In 
time to get dinner, I put on the teakettle and change 
my dress while it is getting ready to boil. I consider 
that another reason why people living In moderate 
circumstances find living so high Is that they take no 
care of things after they get them. The best clothes 
are worn on any and all occasions, Instead of sometimes 
wearing second-best, and so saving the best. They 
think It Is too much bother to change their clothes, and 
then wonder to find they are soiled. I plan to have a 
few good things rather than a lot of cheaper ones. For 
instance, I have a broadcloth suit that I have worn 
three years; not for best last year, and I shall still wear 
It In the rain this year. It was so well made that it has 
kept Its shape. Then I have a white lingerie dress, 
made by the best dressmaker here. I have had it three 
years, but I shall feel entirely happy In It this afternoon 
when I wear it to a party where all the other women 
will have this year's dresses. 

"Henry does not smoke, or spend money for any 
such luxuries, but he has so far to go for his classes that 
his carfare bill is just twice what It would naturally be. 

"I know no other young people who spend so much on 
books and periodicals as we do; but you see It Is a mat- 
ter of business — a part of Henry's equipment for his 
work. Really, we have more magazines than we pay 
for, because Henry contributes to some which are sent 
him free. I feel that these books are sort of educational 
whetstones for his brains, and that we can't afford to 
do without a single one. 

"I guess I've analyzed everything In this list but 
incidentals. I wasn't going to tell you about them, 



Chance vs. The Budget 73 

but I will. They are mostly violets, lilies of the valley 
and candy which my husband gets for me. I can't 
seem to break him of the habit, but, really, I don't 
object very much. 

"You ask how we save if we want anything extra. 
We don't believe in spending all that we earn; so if we 
want anything extra, we just write checks for it. We 
plan ahead for the extra by saving some all the time. 

"Do you know it's very saucy to inquire into 
people's private affairs like this!" 

As yet the Allisons have not had to meet the 
problems of a family, and the extra time and care 
and expense as well as the extra joy that children 
bring. 

Whether this policy of "saving all the time" is 
socially advantageous, is not in question here. 
The important thing is that Mrs. Allison is likely 
to accomplish what she sets out to do, because she 
plans beforehand how she is going to spend her 
money. Of course, she might get on by the simple, 
old-fashioned method of trusting to chance and 
then scrimping when expenses outrun income, 
but a budget is the modern improvement on that 
way. A budget is merely a machine to convert 
the raw material of an income into whatever one \/ 
plans to get out of life; and if you get the right 
sort of a light-running budget, you can make it 
turn out savings, or a chance to write, or profes- 
sional opportunities, as you choose. Whether you 
are living on a salary or the profits of a modest 
business, whether like the Millars you decide to 



74 Increasing Home Efficiency 

rent or like the Allisons to own your own home, 
you need a budget of your own as much as a city 
or great industrial corporation. You can't take 
any other person's budget unless you have the 
same income, the same sized family, live in the 
same locality and are aiming at the same goal. 
Budgets don't come ready-made, a dozen in the 
box; you've got to work one out for yourself, adapt- 
ing it to your particular circumstances and aspira- 
tions. These families, — the Millars in the Metro- 
politan suburb, the Lewises and the Eatons on their 
New York and Nebraska farms, the Allisons in 
their small California city, know what they want 
out of life and are using their budgets to get it. 
That is really the basis of all budget building, — 
and therefore the basis of efficient home manage- 
ment, — to know what your home is for. 



CHAPTER V 
First Aid to the Budget-Maker 

I HAVE three thousand a year," writes a man 
from Wisconsin. "How ought I to spend 
it?" 

A woman from New Hampshire duplicates this 
question, and men and women everywhere cry 
out for a schedule on which to drop their money 
and see it run, Hke marbles on a bagatelle board, 
into the proper pockets. 

When these questioning ones are financially at 
the lower edge of the middle class — that is, have 
about $1,200 a year income and the average family 
of three children — such a schedule is not hard to 
make, because it involves only the expenditures 
that are essential to physical efficiency. At the 
rate of thirty-five cents per adult man per day, they 
must spend $447.15 for food; shelter will cost 
about $144; clothes, a minimum of $100; light, 
heat and other operating expenses, $1 50; insurance, 
savings, recreation, health, and the cost of keeping 
a child of fourteen in school instead of sending it 
to work, approximately $312; while about $46.85 
must go for incidentals. This we believe to be the 
average minima for maintaining an average family 
in health ancj decency in the United States today. 

75 



76 Increasing Home Efficiency 

During the last four years some two hundred 
accounts of the expenditures of middle-class 
families have come to us. It is obvious that the 
general level of instruction in mathematics is 
pretty low. Sometimes the accounts don't balance 
within $300; sometimes people state frankly that 
they spend their incomes "probably about such 
and such a way." One man says naively: 

"I notice that this account adds up $211 more 
than my salary, so I suppose there is a mistake 
somewhere." 

There is! 

But, in spite of the popular inadequacy in the 
presence of figures, seventy-six of these budgetary 
accounts are mathematically correct and bear the 
stamp of truth. These seventy-six are from every 
part of the United States, cover practically every 
occupation of the middle class, and concern no in- 
come of over ^5,000 a year. That seventy-six 
records of this character furnish slight basis for 
elaborate generalization, we fully realize; but the 
conclusions to which they lead are valuable as 
indicating the truth. These budgets show that 
families with incomes of $1,000 or below, from 
whatever part of the country they come or in what- 
ever work they are engaged, average less than the 
minimum expenditure for health in every item. Al- 
though they average only one and a third children 
to the family, and therefore could meet the condi- 
tions of health by spending as little as $332.15 a 
year for food, they do not actually reach this food 
minimum by $66.75, ^^^ ^^^7 average a deficit of 



First Aid to the Budget-Maker 77 

$72.97 on their total annual account. Obviously, 
families with Incomes near $1,200 a year — the line 
of decency which marks the entrance to the middle 
class — have little choice as to how they shall spend 
their money If they are to remain physically effi- 
cient. It is possible to say how their family budg- 
et ought to be made. No budget will make an 
income of less than $1,000 enough for bare health 
and decency; It cannot spend one dollar twice. 

For Instance, take the expense account of the Cald- 
well family — father, mother, two children under 
seven — living In Chicago on an Income of $1,079.50 
a year, with a deficit of $191.18; the expenditures 
for such a family, on such an income. In such a place, 
according to the minima for health, should be: 

Minima 

Food $ 344.93 

Shelter 144.00 

Clothing 100.00 

Operation 150.00 

Advancement 312.00 

Incidentals 46.85 

$1,097.78 
Mr. Caldwell spends: 

Food $ 304.26 

Shelter 307.50 

Clothes 1 15-25 

Operation 185.36 

Advancement 288.20 

Incidentals 70.1 1 

$1,270.68 



78 Increasing Home Efficiency 

The most a budget can do for Mr. Caldwell is 
to show him how to reduce his deficit to ^18.28, — 
the difference between $1,097.78 and his income 
of $1,079.50 — and pointout his three lines of action: 
earn $18.28 more a year, work out some coopera- 
tive scheme by which the things he must have will 
cost him less, or give away the baby. People in his 
dilemma have tried all three. Mr. Caldwell, being 
on the ragged edge, can take a budget ready made. 
When the income is over $1,200, the family 
has passed the line of decency and entered the 
realm of choice. Whether the surplus is wasted 
or saved need not affect their physical efficiency. 
Their budget need not say how the entire income 
must be spent, but will show how it may be spent to 
gain whatever special end the family has in view. 
It is a philosopher's stone to transmute a mere 
money surplus into opportunity. 

For instance, Mr. French, a teacher, with a wife 
and two children, having an income of $3,311 a 
year, and living in a large Massachusetts town, 
sends his expense account and asks how he can 
save $1,000 a year. Now it is perfectly evident 
that he can do this, because the $2,311 he would 
have left is enough to maintain his family in health. 
Here is a digest of his expense account: 

Food $ 386.76 

Shelter 484.32 

Clothes 413-25 

Operation 439-46 

Advancement 1,587.21 

$3,311.00 



First Aid to the Budget-Maker 79 

Mr. French's children are so nearly grown that 
the minimum cost of feeding them is, according to 
our standard, $434.35, which is $47.59 more than 
he spends now; but this dlflference is accounted for 
by the vegetables he raises in his garden. Prob- 
ably he cannot reduce his food cost further. He 
pays $340.32 over the minimum for shelter, 
$313.25 over for clothes, $289.46 over for opera- 
tion, and $1,275.21 over for advancement. But 
in his case these minimum expenditures must be 
modified by the consideration of what is custom- 
ary in his profession. Our collection of budgets show 
that teachers with families average $256.76 for 
shelter, $206.86 for clothes, $251.22 for operation, 
$754.34 for advancement, and $150.50 for inci- 
dentals, with a deficit of $12.20. Mr. French 
already puts Into savings and Insurance $337.34; 
to Increase this to $1,000 he might reduce the 
shelter and clothing to what Is normal for his class, 
and garner the $228.71 he would still need from the 
operating expenses of his household, or anywhere 
along the line of advancement, from charity or the 
church, recreation, travel, or gifts, or by keeping 
his daughter home from college. 

Whether that $1,000 a year will not cost the 
community and himself a price he is unwilling to 
pay, no budget can show him. Will not his 
daughter's college training bring In a higher rate of 
interest than the bank would pay.^ Are not good 
clothes for the advantage of his family.^ The cost 
of operation might be cut if Mrs. French would 
do all of her own work instead of only part of it, 



8o Increasing Home Efficiency 

as she does now. No budget will tell him whether 
it is wise for him to make these retrenchments or 
not. But if he considers the saving of ^i,ooo the 
most important thing he can do, the surplus above 
what is necessary for health, even according to the 
standards of his class, is there, and the budget will 
guide him to it. 

It is a more delicate matter to adjust a family 
budget so that it will wipe out a deficit in happi- 
ness and social usefulness, but it can at least be 
made to show where the trouble lies in the case of 
such a family as the Wilsons of St. Paul. Mr. 
Wilson is a professional man, earning ^3,000 a 
year, and there are two small children in the fam- 
ily. They are not trying to save more than they 
do and they run no deficit; but, as Mrs. Wilson 
writes : 

"As for advancement, you see, it is small. We 
have sacrificed it to the physical care of the babies. 
I belong to a college and study club, and my hus- 
band to a club or two of his profession, but we 
rarely attend, and have dropped from regular to 
occasional church-goers. The children are the 
reason for everything we do, and the excuse for all 
we do not do. We have sacrificed community to 
individual efficiency. Is it worth while .^ I think 
so, though I sometimes chafe under it." 

This is the Wilsons' budget compared with the 
minimum schedule, and the average expenditures 
of their group: 



First Aid to the Budget-Maker 8i 

Average for 

Minima Prof. Group Actual 

Food ^332.15 ^463-27 $ 44S-00 

Shelter 144.00 489.29 1,000.00 

Clothes 100.00 252.43 400.00 

Operation 150.00 393-72 550.00 

Advancement 312.00 803.04 455 -oo 

Incidentals 46.85 196.57 150.00 

The Wilsons have a margin above the decency 
line of ^1,800. Why should the responsibility of 
the way it is spent be put upon two small children 
without their knowledge or consent? Why should 
it be necessary for Mrs. Wilson to spend a lifetime 
chafing for things it would be for her social advan- 
tage to have.^ Does chafing make her a better 
mother? Would not ^700 or $800 deducted from 
the cost of shelter and operation give freedom and 
other valuable things in exchange? If the com- 
munity were consulted, wouldn't it rather have 
some other return from the Wilsons than that they 
should live in even the most superior of houses? 

If the spending of the surplus of a single family 
is a social problem, much more is the spending of 
the surplus of a group or profession. To deter- 
mine how these group surpluses are spent we have 
averaged the cost of the different items of ex- 
penditure in the budgets we have collected both 
with regard to the size of the incomes, to the 
occupation of the father, the number of children 
in the family, and to the locality in which they 
live. 



82 



Increasing Home Efficiency 



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First Aid to the Budget-Maker 85 

It must be remembered that the families with 
a thousand a year or less at the top of this table 
of budgets are not the immigrant families with the 
traditionally large number of children and the 
correspondingly high death rate; they are families 
that by tradition, feeling, association and intent 
belong to the middle class. 

These tables show that the amount spent on food 
increases from $265.40 a year for incomes of 
$1,000 or less, to $572.57 for incomes from $4,000 
to $5,000, but that the proportion of the income 
spent on food drops 4^/2 P^r cent for every $1,000 
increase in income. The percentage spent for 
food is highest in the families of mechanics and 
clergymen, presumably because mechanics need 
a larger amount of food to replace their physical 
wear, and because the clergymen are compelled 
by the tradition of their calling to entertain many 
guests. 

It is interesting to find the lowest average for 
food in cities of from fifty to one hundred thousand 
inhabitants — that is, in cities large enough to have 
adequate transportation facilities for bringing in 
provisions, and not so large as to force up prices 
through an excessive demand. Food costs most 
in the smaller cities which are either metropolitan 
suburbs with transportation charges in addition 
to city prices, or which are aside from the main 
lines of transportation and have to pay abnormal 
freight rates. In other words, the cost of food 
above the price paid the farmer who raises it and 
the butcher who slaughters it and the grocer 



86* Increasing Home Efficiency 

who brings it to the door, is the tax paid the 
railways. 

The average amounts spent for shelter show that 
people with incomes under a thousand dollars have 
got to be content with tenement conditions if 
they live in the city, or similar inadequate housing 
in the country, and that such shelter can be had 
for eleven per cent of their incomes. A sudden 
jump to twenty per cent takes place with an income 
between ^i,ooo and $1,200 which is the point of 
breaking into the middle class, and shows how much 
the middle class value a decent place to live in. 
From this twenty per cent there is a drop of three 
per cent with each thousand dollar increase in 
income. Clergymen average the lowest for shelter, 
because a parsonage is often part of their salary, 
and the small capitalist spends the largest percent- 
age; but the salaried employe and the struggling 
professional man spend the next highest, because 
respectable shelter marks their place in the middle 
class. The percentage spent for shelter is highest 
in cities of over one hundred thousand inhabitants, 
where the high taxes and crowding send up the 
rents. 

The cost of clothing shows the most stable per- 
centage of all the six heads of expenditure. It 
varies from nine to twelve per cent for all places, 
incomes, and occupations, with the exception of 
clergymen and physicians, whose professions re- 
quire disproportionate expenditure on clothes. 
The minimum expenditure on clothes In New York 
City is $100 a year, and this is less than in most 



First Aid to the Budget-Maker 87 

other places. All the accounts we have received 
from families with incomes of less than ^1,000 a 
year show less than this health minimum for 
clothes, the average for this group being ^86.87. 

It appears that the middle-class standard of 
living, whether in city or country, in whatever 
profession, and with whatever income, implies be- 
tween $200 and ^400 a year spent for the operation 
of the household. The farm budgets do show a 
higher expenditure than this, but this is because 
the cost of farm labor, which should be counted 
as a business charge, is included under household 
operation. Though there is a minimum below 
which the charges for food and shelter and clothes 
dare not go, operating costs can go down indefi- 
nitely. But where people have even a little leeway 
they appear willing to sacrifice a good deal for com- 
fort and convenience, for light enough, and heat 
enough, and a chance to substitute the work of 
the laundry and the bakeshop and the clothing 
factory for the work of their hands. The amount 
of the operating costs which goes for personal serv- 
ice varies from ^22.56 for families with Incomes of 
$1,000 and under, to $259.09 for families with from 
$4,000 to $5,000, showing that only after the in- 
come passes $4,000 does the average family hire 
an average servant at the average price of $5.00 a 
week. 

It is under Advancement^ however, that we get 
the real significance of an increased income. This 
rises from $286.06 on a $1,000 Income to $2,683.15 
on a $5,000 Income. The curve develops unbroken 



88 Increasing Home Efficiency 

from the low-paid occupations to the higher, ex- 
cept in the case of educators, who are forced by 
the necessities of their work to spend a large 
amount on their own improvement. 

The expenditure for Incidentals is a question of 
accurate accounting as much as anything, but the 
inability of people with less than $i,ooo to live 
within their Incomes, as shown by their average 
deficit of nine per cent, and the way this deficit 
shades to the disappearing point at ^3,000 a year, 
is a significant answer to those people who Insist 
that ability to live within one's income is purely a 
matter of good management, quite unrelated to the 
size of the income. Is there any reason to believe 
that men earning more than $3,000 a year are more 
likely to select wives with reference to their house- 
keeping ability than those with Incomes under that 
sum? What other explanation can there be for the 
fact that ill-paid clergymen In small towns run 
the highest percentage of deficit, while capitalists, 
business men, and successful physicians run none 
at all? 

But, after all, it is the surplus, — that is, the 
margin above the decency line, — and not the 
deficit, that Is Important in these middle-class 
budgets. Do the various groups give an adequate 
social return for the extra amount of money they 
receive ? To mechanics society gives $503 .97 above 
the minimum for health, and It goes mostly Into 
better housing, savings, charity, and the church. 
Their average of two and a half children is high 
for the middle class, but low for the wage-working 



First Aid to the Budget-Maker 89 

class. The salaried employes have a surplus of 
$747.63, and they distribute it quite differently 
from the mechanics. They eat nearly $yo better, 
they increase their housing cost nearly $100 above 
the mechanics, they spend more than double what 
the mechanics do on clothes — the difference be- 
tween the requirements of shop and office — but 
they also, like the mechanics, put most of their sur- 
plus into savings and insurance, even though they 
run an average deficit of $16.68, — or eight-tenths 
of one per cent of their average income — to do It. 
None of their surplus goes into increasing their 
number of children; on the contrary, they average 
about a child less to the family than the mechanics. 

In the professions, where the surplus Is $1,178.98, 
the average number of children goes up to nearly 
two In the family, and the bulk of the surplus of 
the professional group goes Into better clothes — 
which might be called a professional requisite — 
and Into savings and charity. In proportion, the 
professional men are more generous than any other 
group, although they, too, run an average deficit 
of $15.41, — seven-tenths of one per cent of their 
incomes, — and spend only $243.98 for vacations, 
travel, education, books, and professional Improve- 
ment — not an excessive amount surely, when 
one considers how much we need better service in 
medicine, law, education, and from the clergy. 

As a sharp contrast to the generosity of the 
professional men comes the niggardliness of the 
farmers, who give away less than three per cent of 
their Incomes, although they average a surplus of 



go Increasing Home Efficiency 

$1,012.34. The farmers put $267.38 into savings 
and insurance, $15.43 '^^^^ health, and $156.88 
into books, education, recreation, and travel. Ob- 
viously the farmers choose money in the bank 
rather than college for their average of two and 
three-fourths children; or improvement or pleasure 
for themselves. 

The business men have a larger surplus above 
the demands of decency than any other group of 
the middle class — $2,251.20. And $1,358.12 goes 
into advancement, while the remainder is dis- 
tributed fairly evenly over the general cost of 
living. Now would it not appear that $1,358.12 
worth of advancement is a social gain ^ An analy- 
sis of this item shows that nearly 38 per cent of it 
goes for savings and insurance, 16 per cent for 
church and charity, while only 34 per cent ($570.41) 
is spent for education, books, and recreation. 
Business men have the choice between running an 
automobile and sending a child to college, and 
they have, on the average, 1.7 children to send. 
Altogether they have sufficient leeway, so that 
neither illness nor another mouth to feed need 
strike them with panic. 

The small capitalists present an Interesting 
phenomenon. They seem to be people who have 
backed out of life — people with small incomes, 
averaging $2,266.66, derived from Investments, on 
which they prefer to live without exertion rather 
than enter any gainful occupation. Certainly 
they make sacrifices to follow their fancies. They 
have fewer children than any other group, spend 



First Aid to the Budget-Maker 91 

only ^102.66 a year on service, showing that they 
either underpay their servants or do without them; 
they spend four per cent less on advancement 
than even mechanics and a higher per cent on food 
and shelter than people who are earning approxi- 
mately the same incomes; they travel little, en- 
tertain little, give little; they simply continue to 
exist. As one of them says: 

"It has seemed to us that college-bred Ameri- 
cans of the Eastern States were becoming stand- 
ardized, were growing into a race of clerks. . . . 
We honored their sturdy sense of duty, their 
long-enduring rectitude, the patience with which 
they carried a heavy load. But we had no wish 
to be like them. . . . We saw the people of 
our own age losing health year by year through 
over-work, under sedentary life and lack of daily 
exercise. We saw them growing yellow and 
flabby and unfit, and the spectacle didn't attract 
us. . . . We have dreaded the tyranny of accus- 
tomed things, the settling down of habits, the 
getting rooted in one place so deeply that it would 
cause pain to shake loose, so at intervals we have 
flavored life with change. . . . We have waged 
a running fight on monotony and routine. We 
dread them more than we dread sin or mistakes of 
judgment, for we believe that they slay the inner 
beauty. When they interweave themselves with 
the human spirit and sap it, they destroy the only 
living thing within us, the only gift that can create 
and communicate joy. . . . By knowing many 
sorts of persons we have hoped that we have cut a 



92 Increasing Home Efficiency 

larger piece out of life than if we had stayed well 
sheltered in our own environment of family and 
education. Realization is only for personal ex- 
perience, and that we were denied because of the 
fortunate accident of birth." 

Temperamental no end! But where does it 
get to ? It might have dropped from the lips of the 
eloquent vagabond in Galsworthy's "Pigeon," 
or be heard rising from any benchload of the un- 
employed in Washington Square. Shall man re- 
turn to the world the good he gets from it by 
preserving an attitude of mind.^ 

There are a few who, writing more in sorrow 
than in anger, ask how the church and the minis- 
try are to be supported when people contribute so 
little to them. It is significant that all but nineteen 
of these seventy-six budgets class church and char- 
ity as one, as though they did not give to religion 
for value received, but as a gratuity to a mendicant. 
Only six of the families that put the church under 
a separate heading give to it as much as they do to 
charity, and three of these six are the families of 
clergymen. 

It appears from these average budgets that 
society is getting a very mixed product from the 
middle-class homes. There ought to be a valuable 
contribution from them because most of them 
have a financial surplus with which to make it. 

A surprising amount they are putting into sav- 
ings and insurance — ^300.58 per family per year 
— equal to almost thirteen per cent of their incomes. 
The question whether this really represents a 



First Aid to the Budget-Maker 93 

social gain or not can only be answered by an intri- 
cate balancing of probabilities. The money they 
save is not idle; it is in the hands of bankers and 
insurance companies. Are these agents making a 
better social use of it than the people themselves 
would if they spent it wisely.^ Could the old age, 
sickness, and death which this ^300.58 per family 
per year is designed to meet be provided at a less 
social cost than the present sacrifices that are being 
made in order to hoard it.f* Is there a relation 
between the fact that the middle class contribute 
less than two children per family and this zeal to 
save.^ Would they be willing to launch a larger 
proportion of children into a world that assured 
them a comfortable old age? 

Just as the making of an individual budget is 
indispensable to the efficiency of the individual 
household, so the collection and interpretation of 
the budgets of large groups is essential to the dis- 
covery of our social mistakes and the means of 
their correction. This is a task for a governmental 
department, and its social importance is equalled 
only by the collection and practical use of vitality 
and morbidity statistics. For society needs a plan 
as much as the individual household, and perhaps 
the most important result of all budget-making 
will prove to be the harmonizing of our individual 
plans with a program of social welfare. 



CHAPTER VI 
Home Administration 

ALICE Morse Earle quotes from the diary 
of Abigail Foote who lived in Connecticut 
L in 1775, as follows: 

"Fix'd gown for Prude, — Mend Mother's Riding 
hood, — Spun short thread, — Carded tow, — Worked 
on Cheese-basket, — Hatchel's flax with Hannah, 
we did 51 lbs. apiece, — Pleated and ironed, — Read a 
Sermon of Doldridge's, — Spooled a piece, — Milked 
the cows, — Spun linen, did 50 knots, — Made a 
Broom of Guinea wheat straw, — Spun thread to 
whiten, — Set a Red dye, — Had two scholars from 
Mrs. Taylor's, — I carded two pounds of whole 
wool and felt Nationly, — Spun harness twine, — 
Scoured the pewter." 

Besides these chores, Abigail Foote washed, 
cooked, knitted, weeded the garden, picked the 
geese, dipped candles in the spring, and made 
soap and sausages in the autumn. 

The efficient administration of her home, once 
required these duties from every American house- 
wife. In the time when steam was merely a swirl- 
ing mist out of a tea-kettle, and electricity only a 
menacing adjunct of thunder storms, before the 
factory system or public utilities had been dreamed 

94 



Home Administration 95 

of, the burden of manufacture was on the house- 
keeper, and if she shifted it at all it was to the 
shoulders of another woman. The servant was 
her one labor-saving device. 

The following advertisement appeared in the 
Pennsylvania Packet of September 23 rd, 1780: 

"Wanted at a Seat about half a day's journey from 
Philadelphia a single Woman of unsullied Reputation, 
an affable, cheerful, active and amiable Disposition; 
cleanly, industrious, perfectly qualified to direct and 
manage the female Concerns of country business as 
raising small stock, dairying, marketing, combing, 
carding, spinning, knitting, sewing, pickling, preserv- 
ing, etc. . . . Such a person will be treated with re- 
spect and esteem, and meet with every encouragement 
due to such a character." 

This was the ideal of the servant, — the female 
Jack-of-All-Trades, the unspecialized factory hand, 
the only means such a mistress as Abigail Foote 
could find to lighten her labors. 

We can find the time when the home was not a 
manufacturing plant, only by peering up into our 
family tree to where our arboreal ancestress, dim, 
brown and hairy, grins back at us from the leafy 
green. Her refuge of intertwined boughs and 
branches was really an independent home, and 
no factory. It passed with her, but it is coming 
again, — the home which is not the seat of any 
productive industry. It will not be a self-sufficient 
home as hers was, — that is gone forever. But it 
will be as free from the obligation to make the 



96 Increasing Home Efficiency 

things it consumes, as a power machine in a cloth- 
ing factory is to make its own parts, though, like 
the power machine, this new home will be driven 
by the rods and belts of our new social life, and be 
held firmly in place by our social needs. To run 
this social machine properly is our present-day 
problem of home administration. 

In reality, this non-manufacturing home Is still 
in the future for most of us, and much further off 
for some than for others, because our homes are 
not all at the same stage of civilization, nor are all 
parts of the same homes at the same stage. What 
is efficiency for one may be inexcusable slackness 
for another. Most of our homes are stuck fast in the 
slough of the manorial tradition, — the pernicious 
and generally unfounded idea that each family 
commands a supply of the necessaries of life from 
its own fields and pastures, and that the way to 
free itself from the burden of manufacturing these 
into useful forms is to hire a servant to do it. In 
pursuance of this superstition, we use the servant 
as a labor-saving device, quite regardless of the 
fact that It is not labor-saving in general that she 
promotes, but merely the saving of her particular 
mistress. 

We are not finding, however, that It Is an easy 
thing to shift the household burden to the servant, 
for the simple reason that, being human, like our- 
selves, and having had a taste of education and 
culture, she declines to receive It. She doesn't 
have to assume It, and as she doesn't like it any 
better than her mistress, — she won't. As one 



Home Administration 97 

woman writes from an eastern manufacturing 
town of eighty thousand Inhabitants: 

"My problem Is complicated in two ways; the 
big industrial concerns offer a variety of employ- 
ment for girls at good wages and short hours, — 
that Is a holiday on Sunday, and a half holiday on 
Saturday; and on the other hand, the presence of a 
large number of salaried officials and engineers, 
creates a large demand for capable servants, so 
that a wage for a competent maid, even in a very 
small family, is forced up to what is in our case 
prohibitive." 

This situation exists everywhere. The middle- 
class servant Is obsolescent, being In the reprehen- 
sible act of vanishing into her own home, on the 
one hand, and into the factory, on the other. It 
may look as though we were confusing the problem 
of home administration with the servant problem; 
but how one shall administer one's home depends 
largely upon what tools one has, and the servant 
is a tool, the vanishing of which leaves us in a linger- 
ing emergency. To be sure, people do not ordina- 
rily realize that the servant Is a tool. "The scar- 
city of good servant girls Is breaking up the homes 
of America," writes a despairing gentleman from 
Pennsylvania, as though she were corn or meat, 
water or air. There was probably a time when 
primitive man cried out that stone axes were 
vanlshlng,-"and how could civilization go on with- 
out theml But civilization wasn't parasitic upon 
the stone ax, any more than the home is parasitic 
upon the cook. The need was for a new tool to 



98 Increasing Home Efficiency 

take the place of the old one, — a bow and arrows in 
place of the ax, — ^just as today there is need for 
mechanical labor-saving devices to replace the 
maid-of-all-work. 

A man with an annual income of three thousand 
writes : 

"We used to have a woman come in by the day. 
When she stopped coming, we just purchased a 
vacuum cleaner for a hundred-and-twenty dol- 
lars, which the women folk now prefer to outside 
help. . . . We have also a motor-operated washing 
machine, two electric sad-irons, and one gas 
iron." 

The wife of a New England physician, whose 
income ranges from three to four thousand dollars 
a year, says: 

"In the last year, I have kept no maid, having 
discharged my last one after nearly six years of 
service, and have enjoyed the year more than any 
previous one. I never hesitate to expend money 
for any labor-saving device. I use a gas range, a 
fireless cooker, have an excellent vacuum cleaner, 
and an adequate supply of all kitchen utensils and 
conveniences. My household expenses have been 
cut down about five hundred dollars a year, and I 
know of no easier way of saving that amount than 
by being free from the care and annoyance of a 
maid. I am surprised to find how small our total 
for food has been this last year." 

"Our house," writes a man with an income of 
five thousand dollars a year, "is arranged all on 
one floor, and all unnecessary rooms and partitions 



Home Administration 99 

are eliminated. Our efforts are directed towards 
keeping down the accumulation of 'things,' so 
that we will not be crowded, and dusting and clean- 
ing will be simplified. Electric current costs us 
twelve cents per kw. hour, and is used rather 
freely, — as fuel only in the flat iron and a small 
heater for the dining-room table; for power, in the 
vacuum cleaner and washer and wringer; and for 
light. For light and power, we do not find the 
electric current expensive, but for heating it is 
very much so. It is not possible to figure how 
much we save in using electrical energy. We are 
content to know that there is a saving of labor, 
which, were we deprived of help, would not make 
us fare so badly." 

A well-to-do minister answers our question: 
"With reference to labor-saving appliances, 
the vacuum carpet cleaner cost one hundred-and- 
thirty-five dollars. It costs about two cents an 
hour for electricity. Eight cents a week will give 
the house of two halls and nine rooms a thorough 
sweeping. The electric washer and wringer is 
sold on the guarantee that it will do the washing 
for a family of six persons in one hour and a half 
at three cents for electricity. We bought the ma- 
chine on that guarantee, and find that it will do 
the work in the given time at the given cost. Our 
gas iron cost three dollars and a half, and does not 
consume any more gas than an ordinary lighting 
jet. We use about fifteen barrels of water per 
week in the house. The hot air pump will pump 
that amount of water in a hundred minutes, using 



loo Increasing Home Efficiency 

about as much gas as five or six open gas jets 
would consume in that time. The engine cost a 
hundred dollars. In five years I have spent only 
fifty-five cents on repairs, and that was for new 
leather valves. The electric heat regulator, which 
controls the flow of natural gas into the furnace, 
cost twenty-eight dollars, and is operated by dry 
batteries which need to be replaced every year at a 
cost of fifty cents for the two. You will notice 
that the wages of an ordinary maid, who is willing 
to do any kind of work about the house, would, in 
a year and a half, amount to more than the cost and 
operation of all my labor-saving appliances." 

In none of these families is it lack of money 
that has supplanted servants with labor-saving 
devices; these housekeepers think them better 
tools with which to run their homes. 

People write about the care and responsibility 
of servants as a major reason for using labor-saving 
appliances in their stead. Women have tacitly 
accepted the responsibility for the conditions 
under which their domestics live and work. They 
no longer question that it is their duty to see 
that their servants have proper food, a comforta- 
ble room, and sufficient wages. Mostly house- 
wives consider that their responsibilities extend 
beyond these things to the point of seeing that 
their servants have recreation, opportunities for 
improvement, and time to rest and see their 
friends. One of their great objects in substitut- 
ing mechanical devices for housemaids, is to 
relieve themselves of this pressing responsibility. 



Home Administration loi 

Have they got to consider whether the vacuum 
cleaner is tired or not? Whether the electric 
washer and wringer has a headache? If the gas 
iron desires a day off to visit its aunt? No! They 
can overwork steel and leather and wood, steam 
and gas and electricity with a conscience free from 
concern for anything but their own pocket-books. 
They can be light-heartedly free from moral re- 
sponsibility toward the thermostat that controls 
the furnace, — Its back never aches! 

But besides being satisfactory substitutes for 
servants, labor-saving appliances can be so re- 
duced In cost that people who couldn't possibly 
afford a servant might well afford them. As Mr. 
H. F. Stimson, chief engineer of the Universal 
Audit Company, says: 

"At present, the amount of physical energy 
known as a kilowatt hour, which can be purchased 
In large quantities in the form of electrical mechan- 
ical energy for two cents, would cost about two 
dollars and twenty-eight cents If purchased In the 
form of human physical energy at the rate of 
twenty cents an hour." 

According to this, It costs less than one per cent 
as much to clean house by electricity as it does by 
hand, — theoretically. Practically, it isn't so cheap 
as that, because, as one of the householders who 
has just been quoted says, "electric current costs 
us twelve cents per kw. hour," which is a wide 
spread between the wholesale cost and the retail 
selling price. It is the same with practically every 
commodity the home administrator uses, from beef 



I02 Increasing Home Efficiency 

to biscuits, from gas to denatured alcohol, from de- 
natured alcohol to electricity. 

Now if the highest efficiency of the home re- 
quires the use of electric appliances, and if the cost 
of them to the retail buyer puts them out of the 
question, what is the home administrator to do ? 
Decide to go without them? Never in the world 
did we get a good thing which we were content to 
go without. Isn't the Ideal manager of the ideal 
home going to insist on having this ideal power? 
But you can't raise a private crop of it in the back 
yard, you can't get it at wholesale and store it up 
for future use, you can't discover a mine of it or a 
place where it grows wild; you can't do any of the 
things by which you are prone to think you can 
circumvent high prices. You have to buy it of a 
corporation. Evidently, the housewife, in trying 
to make her administration efficient will run 
head-on into a public service corporation, — a pub- 
lic utility. Is it true that in order to control her 
kitchen, she has got to control the public service 
corporations ? 

"But aren't you galloping unnecessarily far 
afield?" cries a perturbed critic, who abhors the 
notion that women should enter practical politics 
and who clings with the tenacity of ancestor wor- 
ship to the superstition that the only proper sphere 
of woman is inside the walls of a house. "I admit 
the great value of labor-saving appliances," says 
this irate gentleman; "now if in addition to using 
these, housewives could be taught to apply the 
principles of scientific management to domestic 



Home Administration 103 

processes, wouldn't the problem of wasteful house- 
hold drudgery be happily solved?" 

Unfortunately, the moment we resort to motion 
studies and the other practices of scientific manage- 
ment, the moment we attempt to apply the same 
principles to household operations, — cooking, wash- 
ing, cleaning, serving, — that are being adopted in 
the modern manufacturing plant, we find ourselves 
in the position of a man trying to run the village 
smithy under the spreading chestnut tree as if it 
were the plant of the United States Steel Corpo- 
ration. The very nature of the" conditions, — and 
their apparent inevitableness, — makes any high 
degree of operating efficiency impossible. In his 
famous experiment in loading pig iron, Mr. Taylor 
was careful to select men who were peculiarly 
fitted for the particular job in hand. He had 
plenty of men to select from, — he had only to pick 
and choose. The supply of potential pig iron han- 
dlers appears to be unlimited. But in the case of 
domestic servants, the demand is said to exceed 
the supply by sixty thousand. Selection is prac- 
tically impossible; the housewife has got to take 
what she can get. Besides, servants are not a 
stable group. By the time they have been taught 
efficient methods of operation, they are gone. The 
schools of domestic science have failed to reach 
wage earners in the kitchen effectively. They have 
only just begun to reach the housewives them- 
selves. And for an intelligent woman to spend 
years in learning to save three minutes in boiling 
an egg or brewing a cup of tea is a good deal like 



/ 



I04 Increasing Home Efficiency 

installing a trip-hammer to drive the occasional 
tack. Moreover, the value of standardized proc- 
esses depends largely upon uniformity of product, 
— and how shall the human product of the home be 
standardized ? 

But In spite of these considerations, some value 
there no doubt is In experiments in scientific man- 
agement In the home, though there Is danger of 
disillusionment In a faddish exaggeration of it. 
Professor Charles and Mary Barnard ran a House- 
keeping Experiment Station at Darien, Connecti- 
cut, where they showed what can be done In 
the way of simplification and efficiency in house- 
hold operations without the modern helps of 
either gas or electricity. Among other things, 
they made elaborate studies In motion saving. 
Take for Instance the cooking of the matutinal 

^gg' ... 

This Is their chart for the cooking of three eggs. 
In the first case, the eggs were boiled with the com- 
paratively Inefficient utensils, stove, saucepan, 
spoon, etc. In the second case they were coddled 
with the efficient fireless coddler. 

1. Place the three eggs in I. With the right hand 

boiling water. lift the cover from 

the coddler. 

2. Watch the clock. Af- 2. Omit. 

ter three minutes, 

3. Take serving dish in 3. Place cover on table. 

left, 
(3 a) spoon in right hand. 



Home Administration 



105 



4. Lift one egg out of 4. 

water. 

5. Place In serving dish. 5. 

6. Place spoon on stove. 6. 



7. Carry service dish to 7 

breakfast room. 

8. Place egg in cup before 8. Omit 

right person. 

9. Return to stove. 9 

10. Place serving dish on 10 

stove. 

11. Look at clock. After 11 

one minute, 

12. Lift second egg from 12 

water with spoon, 
with same motions 
as 3, 4, 5 and 6. 

13. Repeat No. 7. 13 

14. Repeat No. 8. 14, 



With left lift kettle of 

hot water at same 

time. 
Lift egg rack from cod- 

dler with right hand. 
Pour a little hot water 

into the coddler. 
Omit. 



Omit. 
Omit. 

Omit. 

Rinse out coddler. 
Pour water in sink. 



15. Repeat No. 9. 

16. Repeat No. 10. 



17. Look at clock. 

one minute, 

18. Repeat 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. 

19. Repeat No. 8. 



Return coddler to table. 
With right hand place 
eggs in rack. 

15. Place rack in coddler. 

16. With left hand lift ket- 

tle. Fill coddler to 
three-egg mark. 
After 17. Omit. 



18. Place kettle on stove. 

19. With right hand put 

cover on coddler. 



io6 Increasing Home Efficiency 

20. Return to kitchen. 20. Carry coddler to break- 

fast table. 

21. 21. Place before mistress. 

22. 22. Return to kitchen. 



Total motions, 27. Total motions, 15. 

Trips to breakfast room, 3. Trips to breakfast room, I. 

Time, six minutes. Time, 50 seconds. 

This schedule is based upon the requirements of 
a family of three persons, each of whom wants 
his eggs cooked with a different degree of hard- 
ness. Where the efficient coddler is used, the eggs 
are simply removed from it at the appropriate 
moment on the table. 

Now, there is no question that Professor and 
Mrs. Barnard have worked out an efficient way 
to cook eggs, nor is there any question that the 
eggs for six or nine or twelve people could be 
cooked as well as the eggs for three with only the 
additional motions of putting more eggs into and 
taking them out of the coddler, and with no 
increased equipment either material or intellectual. 

Mrs Mary Pattison, who has established a 
Housekeeping Experiment Station at Colonia, 
New Jersey, with all the facilities of gas and elec- 
tricity, tested out an electric washer and wringer 
with which she believes she can do the washing 
for twelve ordinary families in a day. Of course 
she does not do the washing for these twelve fam- 
ilies a day — seventy-two families per week — be- 
cause she is concerned with the small uneconomic 



Home Administration 107 

unit of the individual home. To do the washing of 
these seventy-two would require no more equip- 
ment and only the slight added expense of more 
electric current to run the machine. 

As Professor and Mrs. Barnard say: "At the 
very foundation of the science of domestic admin- 
istration lies the conservation of human energy." 
From the standpoint of society as a whole, more 
energy can be conserved by bunching the home 
units into larger groups and operating them on 
the wholesale plan. That money should be con- 
served is a secondary consideration because money 
is of less value than human brain or muscle, but 
it is sufficiently worth while, and it too can more 
easily be conserved in the larger unit, by co- 
operative effort — by putting the labor-saving de- 
vice, the economy of motion, the planning and 
routing of the work, Into the hands of the willing 
public utility, whether privately or publicly owned. 

But it is quite out of the question to coddle eggs 
for six people when there are only three to eat 
them. There is no special object In doing the wash- 
ing for seventy-two families a week in the presence 
of the obvious fact that there is only the work of 
one family to be done. Although homes which 
are detached and isolated have much in common 
with homes in the close proximity of apartment 
buildings, hotels or compact city blocks, there 
are matters in which they cannot be brought on a 
common footing; but any household function that 
can be taken outside the four walls of the home, 
such as the washing and making of clothes, the 



io8 Increasing Home Efficiency 

canning and preserving of foods and a hundred 
other detachable functions, can be solved in the 
same way for both of them. In the cooperative 
use of such things as vacuum cleaners by a coun- 
try neighborhood, the isolated homes are securing 
the advantages of city life. But our civilization, — 
as far as we have got with it, — has left a good many 
functions that must be performed at short range, 
and in such things as the broiling of beefsteaks 
and the making of beds, the farm home and the 
city flat are a whole world apart. These short 
range problems must be solved in entirely different 
ways for the two conditions of living. Where the 
public utility cannot yet step in and become the 
family servant, the smaller caliber efficiency of 
simplified living, motion saving, and the labor- 
saving device, must be used. It is for these fam- 
ilies that housekeeping experiment stations are 
run and individual labor-saving devices invented. 
But it isn't as though each family, having its 
own set of light-running, labor-saving devices cor- 
ralled on its own premises, so to speak, had solved 
the problem of efficient home administration. Be- 
cause a thing can be done easily and well in the 
home is no possible reason why it should be done 
there. In these days of wonders, it is conceivable 
that a machine might be invented for the home 
manufacture of shoes, — paper patterns being 
furnished, and instructions how to feed in a little 
raw leather, a few buttons, and a bit of thread at 
one end, turn a crank and take out a pair of shoes 
at the other. But do we want to bring shoe-making 



Home Administration log 

back into the home on that account? No labor- 
saving device that made this possible would be in 
the direction of real efficiency. 

For, after all, the labor-saving device is but a 
temporary host for the parasitic home. Almost as 
soon as it has successfully supplanted the servant, 
it slides away and leaves us grafted upon the pub- 
lic utility. We've been gradually growing depend- 
ent upon the public utility ever since we dispensed 
with the individual cow and the individual pig, 
and put our trust in consolidated milk companies 
and the gentlemen's agreement of the beef combine. 
We don't call them public utilities, of course; we 
call them Petersen's Butcher Shop and Frank's 
Grocery Emporium. We think we are "dealing ; 
with our tradesmen"; but we are no more inde- | 
pendent of the public utilities that control them 
than we are of the corporation back of the tele- 
phone girl. It's a pretty straight road to the pub- 
lic utility, — the hedges on either side are too high 
to jump, — and we are rushing along it whenever we f 
send our wash to the laundry, use electric power, ; 
or have a caterer when we entertain. 

A Canadian woman writes of a firm that supplies 
a vacuum cleaner at a dollar a day, thus saving 
her the expense of the original Investment and the 
labor of operating her own. A woman from con- 
servative Maine says: 

"I was the first In our city to have an electric 
iron, but experience has taught me that the best 
way is to put your whole washing into the laundry 
to be done. Select the right laundry and manage 



no Increasing Home Efficiency 

right, and the clothes are not worn out or lost more 
than any other way. At the best, a washing in the 
house is disorganizing, no matter how it is done. 
I was one of the first to have an electric cleaner in 
my home, but I think now it is better to have a 
man come with one, and use it whenever you need, 
than to put out your own strength to use one." 

These housewives are by no means exceptional; 
their experiences show the labor-saving device, 
modern as it is, in the act of being absorbed into 
general industry like the maid-of-all-work before 
it. And they're only doing what the rest of us do 
whenever we buy a ready-made dress, or a loaf of 
bread, or for the matter of that, a bound book or a 
china dish. If for no other reason, this grafting 
of the home upon the public utility will go on be- 
cause it pays. It isn't a question of whether we 
individually can afford the greater expense of home 
production; it is the community that cannot let 
any of us waste money or muscle or brain. For 
whether we intend it or not, whether we see it or 
not, what one wastes, either in labor or intelligence, 
is taken from all the rest of us. And though each 
of the industries has to be packed out of the home 
separately, there is no manner of use in trying to 
derail the train that is thundering them to the 
eager corporation; for they have heard the call of 
economy and they will go. 

But if we are forced to let the actual industries 
on which the home depends become public utilities, 
we cannot in that way escape from personal re- 
sponsibility toward those who serve us. The girls 



Home Administration iii 

who make our pastry in the bake-shop, the women 
who wash our clothes in the laundry, the men who 
work sixteen hours a day at the machine when it 
is "rush season by ladies cloaks" on the East 
Side of New York, the mill operatives in France 
who starve when women choose to reduce the 
amount of cloth in their gowns by half, are all our 
domestic servants once removed. 

Take the family wash. In the days when it was 
all done at home, the wife had it under short-range 
control and accepted the responsibility of its being 
well done under decent conditions. The long- 
range modern responsibility of having it done in 
the outside laundry is just as binding and far 
harder to meet. This new responsibility is of two 
kinds: that toward the housewife's own family who 
are consumers of clean clothes and household linen; 
and that toward the girls who work in the laundry, 
the producers, the household servants once re- 
moved. Suppose the housewife lives in New York 
City, or Chicago, or San Francisco, or Boston, and 
sends her clothes to some clean and modest little 
shop with a "Hand Work Only" sign in the 
window, a realistic clothes-line in the rear, and a 
genuine shirt ironer before her eyes. It looks all 
right; but the chances are overwhelmingly in favor 
of the real washing being done by the "rough 
drier" whose wagon calls twice a day for the cus- 
tomers' bundles of soiled clothes and returns them 
damp and unlroned twenty-four hours later. 
These "rough-dry" establishments are called the 
"sweaters" of the trade, and those who patronize 



112 * Increasing Home Efficiency 

them run the risk of all who use sweated goods — 
uncleanliness. Their particular form of unclean- 
liness is due to the custom of packing the unwashed 
clothes from different households into nets to- 
gether, and washing them in bulk. Where colored 
clothes are included, sterilizing agents cannot be 
applied; warm water only is used and the danger of 
contagion and the spread of vermin is great. 

Is it efficient housekeeping to allow this ? 

The recent laundry strike in New York City 
brought to light the facts that the girls work in in- 
tensely heated rooms, insufficiently ventilated, 
artificially lit and for periods reaching as high as 
seventy-five hours a week in defiance of the New 
York labor law which then * limited the hours of 
women's work to sixty a week; and that while a 
few skilled washers are paid as much as ^30.00 a 
week, a large proportion of the workers get as 
little as ^4.00, and this without the board and 
lodging which adds to the wages of the home laun- 
dress. 

From society's point of view, is it efficient house- 
keeping to allow such conditions to exist.'' 

The time is not past by any means when it is a 
personal reproach to the housewife to serve her 
family unwholesome bread, to let her wash be 
badly done, to wear shoddy clothes, to starve the 
people who work for her. These things are and 
always were a sign of inefficiency, and their char- 
acter isn't altered because the housewife's servants 

* A law limiting the hours for women to 54 a week was passed 
by the N. Y. Legislature in 191 2. 



Home Administration 113 

do their work away from her immediate oversight. 
We can't bring the prodigal spinning-wheel home 
again — can we regulate the woolen mill ? 

It's idle to try and back out of this extended 
responsibility by saying that every woman ought 
to do the work of her own household. Suppose 
she could, (which she can't), and suppose she 
would, (which she won't), could the community 
afford to let her? So long as we have got labor- 
saving devices invented and have developed public 
utilities, the piece-meal work of the human hand in 
the home has become wasteful. And in economics, 
it is affably recognized, though for the most part 
reluctantly stated, that wasteful work is only a 
form of idleness, a nervous fluttering of the drone, 
so to speak. Professor Frank Tracy Carlton, of 
Albion College, puts it in this way: 

"When an old art is dying out in consequence of 
being superseded by a new art, attempts are in- 
variably made to complicate needlessly the proc- 
esses of work employed in the old art, — to make 
work. The efforts of the various housekeeping 
magazines point to the decline and decay of house- 
hold industry as a separate and unified form of 
industry. One of the important functions of these 
numerous journals is that of earnestly striving to 
dignify useless work through the introduction of 
various and sundry complications." 

We may as well face the fact cheerfully that 
industry in the home is doomed; that a home ad- 
ministration that tries to hang on to the coat-tails 
of home manufacture in a sentimental frenzy to 



114 Increasing Home Efficiency ; 

deter its flight, instead of cheerfully handing out ' 
its hat and cane and opening the front door, is no 
efficient administration. All the flutteration to 
put handsewing, and home-baking, and preserv- i 
ing, and the making of Christmas mincemeat on I 
a plane of what might be called moral elegance is i 
just a bracing back against tomorrow. For right i 
on the face of it, a home can be inefficient in having I 
too much muscle and brains put into it in propor- | 
tion to the output, just as it can be inefficient ! 
through having too much money put into it. It j 
is possible to pay too much even for perfection. If i 
three women can do the work of five households i 
sufiiciently well, can society afford to take five \ 
women to do it in a world that still needs so much ' 
to be done — it being remembered always that the , 
home is not a thing to be produced regardless of ! 
cost or consequences, but a means to civilization? , 
This chapter is not trying to do anything but ; 
show how the wind blows. It isn't meant to be a , 
stone sign-post, but a well oiled weather vane. '■ 
And so it points directly away from the time to i 
which Charlotte Perkins Gilman referred when she \ 
said: ! 



"Six hours a day the woman spends on food, j 
Six mortal hours! | 



Till the slow finger of heredity writes on the forehead 
of each living man, 
Strive as he may: 'His mother was a cook!'" 



Home Administration 115 

Not a desirable motto for the human brow to 
bear, and only slightly less distressing than that 
written all over dyspepsia-ridden frames: "His 
mother couldn't cook." For the horrid truth is 
that the majority of women cannot cook. Take 
Vermont, a nice, backward, domestic state, with 
no cities of the first-class, and therefore not es- 
pecially addicted to delicatessen stores or foreign 
restaurants. Ten and one-tenth per cent of its 
inhabitants die of digestive troubles! 

Apparently women will not stand for these six 
hours a day spent on food, resulting in the death 
of ten per cent of those fed. Whenever they can, 
they save themselves by handing the six hours of 
work over to another woman. But there aren't 
enough detached women to go around; and any 
way, hiring a servant isn't labor-saving, but labor- 
shifting. So housewives are catching at the mod- 
ern labor-saving device, even when it is not a 
money-saving device, as it should be. And be- 
cause the labor of operating labor-saving devices 
is in itself a thing to be saved, they are reaching 
out to the corporation which can distribute the 
cost of these new inventions among a score or a 
hundred households. 

The manufacturer of an electric motor for a 
sewing machine recently wrote a plaintive letter 
asking why women are so reluctant to buy a device 
that is so cunningly designed to lighten their 
labors. It appears that women are not anxious 
to make sewing easier to do; they want to get rid 
of it altogether, — to make it an industry and put 



ii6 Increasing Home EflSciency 

it out of the house. From all over the country they 
write : 

"We buy ready-made clothes because they are 
cheaper and better." 

This is right in line with the civic associations 
which in the South are buying themselves vacuum 
cleaners to be used by a whole township; with the 
cooperative laundries in the farmside villages; 
with the hundred other public utilities that are 
beginning to do our chores. There is no use getting 
sentimental when some favorite industry bursts 
out of the front gate! 

In Vassar College some fifteen years ago, the 
girls had a song in which the hero asked his be- 
loved : 

"Can you brew, can you bake, 
Good bread and cake?" 
Before my love I utter. 

"Can you sew a seam? 
Can you churn the cream? 
And bring the golden butter? 
What use is refraction, 
Chemical reaction, biologic protoplasm, 
Psychologic microcosm? 

"Would you be my weal. 
You must cook the meal, — 

"You shake your head,— 
You ril not wed, — 
And so. Farewell!" 



Home Administration 117 

If that song were rewritten and brought up to 
date, the lover's questions would be much harder 
to answer, and yet they might not be so disconcert- 
ing. They would run something like this: 

"Are you up on the pure food laws affecting the manu- 
facture of canned soup? 

"Can you assure me that you know the conditions 
governing the sanitary production of pastry? 

"Can you bring enough influence to bear on public 
opinion so that the family clothing will not have 
to be made in a sweat-shop? 

"Do you know how to get honest government in- 
spectors appointed, to assure me of the purity of 
the milk and meat and butter you promise to 
serve me? 

"What use in your knowing 
Everything of sewing. 
All of pickling and preserving, 
All of washing and of serving? 

** Would you be my weal, 
Do not cook the meal, — 

"You shake your head, — 
You I'll not wed, — 
And so, Farewell!" 



CHAPTER VII 
The Home and the Market 

MRS. FRANK WATROUS is the conserva- 
tive wife of a high-salaried man living 
in New Jersey. She is the mother of 
four, and not socially rebellious. But the other 
day she cried: 

"These high prices make me so angry! I can't 
afford to have anything but the very best for my 
family — it doesn't pay. Besides, I've a right to 
the best!" 

And when asked why she thought she had a 
right to anything she couldn't pay for, she con- 
tinued: 

"I'm not pretending to be able to pay for the 
best in money, but I'm paying society in four able- 
bodied, able-brained children, each trained to a 
useful profession; by keeping Frank in health and 
temper to do his work; and by what I'm doing on 
the school committee. I'm furnishing society with 
the best product in the way of citizens. Don't I 
need the best raw material to make it with ? Can 
I make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.^*" 

Ever since the Children of Israel tried to make 
bricks without straw, the generations of man have 
been struggling with that problem — especially in 

ii8 



The Home and the Market 119 

the home, where we have been handicapped by 
the belief that an alchemy in the atmosphere will 
transform second-rate material into first-rate prod- 
uct; transmute base metal into gold. It is cer- 
tainly to the advantage of society that the home 
should turn out the very best product; why, then, 
do we continue to buy poor raw materials when we 
have, as Mrs. Watrous insists, a right to the best? 
We have asked this question of some scores of 
men and women living widely apart on the map, 
and their reasons, differently stated, shake down 
into three: 

"There isn't enough of the best to go round." 
"We don't know the best when we see it." 
"The best costs so much that we can't afford it." 
All of them good, truthful reasons for putting 
up with substitutes! 

Now of course there have been many thousand 
generations — all through the time which Professor 
Simon Patten, of the University of Pennsylvania, 
describes as the Civilization of a Deficit — when 
some of us starved because nowhere within reach 
was there food enough, when some of us froze be- 
cause there were neither houses nor clothes enough, 
when we stood for lack of chairs, walked for lack 
of wagons, and died for lack of medicines; when 
there was not enough of anything — let alone the 
best — to go around. But we have reached the 
Civilization of a Surplus now, and it's only a step 
farther to where there will not only be enough, but 
enough of the best, for us all. Already storekeepers, 
manufacturers, builders, tell us we can have what 



I20 Increasing Home Efficiency 

we demand, but that we don't get the best because 
we don't demand it. 

Now, not for a moment must we confuse the 
best with the most expensive — they do not have to 
be the same, though often they are. 

"This," said a manufacturer of colored calen- 
dars, Christmas cards, and valentines, as he held 
up a scalloped square showing a green and brown 
castle against a cerise sky and covered with dia- 
mond dust to represent snow — "this is what sells. 
I don't make such things for my own pleasure. I 
make them because people want them. I'm ready 
to make anything they demand — it costs no 
more." 

But cards might perhaps be relegated to the 
realm of taste, so let's get down to food. We spent 
a summer in a small village where the vegetable 
supply ran the appetizing cycle of beets, turnips, 
carrots, parsnips, onions, and then "repeat" 
indefinitely. A neighboring hotel absorbed all 
the lettuce and peas and sweet corn that were 
raised. 

"Can't you grow enough salad for the rest of 
us?" we desperately asked a peddling farmer. 

"I dunno. Mebbe I might put in more green 
things if anybody'd buy 'em. They's room 
enough; mebbe I might. I dunno but what I will." 

We were looking through some new apartment 
buildings overlooking the park — large, gaudy, ex- 
pensive. 

"Why do you put in such shallow fireplaces.'^" 
we asked the agent. "They won't draw. And 



The Home and the Market 121 

those ice-boxes will melt the ice almost as fast as 
one puts it in; and the bathroom door opens the 
wrong way, — and — " 

"Well, you see," he mterrupted hastily, ** no- 
body who comes to rent them knows how they 
ought to be." 

Now, if the home-maker who ought to have the 
best for his home doesn't know what the best is, 
what is going to be done? The natural answer is 
that he had better find out. "Let every man be 
his own expert!" 

But how would that be wiser than having every 
man be his own shoemaker.^ 

"By getting acquainted with the butcher we buy 
very desirable cuts of meat for from five to ten 
cents a pound. Any one can do the same who 
knows the ropes," writes a man from Massachu- 
setts, under the evident delusion that he has solved 
the problem of intelligent marketing. This is — 
let us say it as gently as we can — a sort of gentle 
graft on the community. Somebody undoubtedly 
pays the extra price which he is spared. It is like 
a political "pull," and does not help the rest of us 
at all. 

Suppose, as he suggests, that we all knew the 
ropes, would we all buy butcher's meat at five to 
ten cents? Suppose our tradesmen are stand- 
offish and won't get acquainted? Let us be ill fed! 
Suppose we ourselves are crabbed and unsociable? 
Let us be ill fed! Suppose we are not sharp, and 
can't learn the ropes? Let us be ill fed, and our 
anaemic children after us! 



122 Increasing Home Efficiency 

But still the schools and the cook books and the 
magazines insist that each buyer shall learn to tell 
the quality of the thing he buys, and except in a 
very few of our commodities, such as serums and 
medicine, where not to be expert may mean sum- 
mary death, it is taken for granted that if the pur- 
chaser gets cheated it is nobody's affair but his 
own. Business cries, ^^ Caveat emptor^ or take the 
consequences!" That might be all right if we our- 
selves could take the consequences. Besides, our 
buying covers so many commodities that it is not 
in our individual power to be expert about them 
all. How can we tell all-wool goods except by the 
label — till afterward.^ How shall we know butter 
from its substitutes .f* What coloring is used in 
canned beans? Whether our ginghams are fast 
colors, or our gas and oil up to standard.^ Only 
through experts on whose word we can depend, 
only through a trustworthy guarantee. The pure 
food laws, the milk inspectors, the city. State, and 
National laboratories, are cooperative efforts to 
take from our individual shoulders the onus of 
knowing the best when we see it. Isn't it a shorter 
road to home efficiency to have the products guar- 
anteed at their source, bottled in bond, as it were, so 
that every home will be insured the best, than it is 
to produce a generation of amateur experts ? Isn't 
it possible that efficient marketing includes not 
necessarily a knowledge of quality, but ability to 
get an official guarantee that will protect the ig- 
norant buyer as well as the wise one ? Can we af- 
ford to have our homes put out an inferior product 



The Home and the Market 123 

either in health, in happiness, in taste or in civic 
usefulness, just because the buyer of the family 
doesn't know good from bad? Society is the con- 
sumer of the products of the home. It suffers if 
these products are below grade. Hasn't Mrs. 
Watrous a right to the best, after all? 

There's another attribute that the best things 
must have besides their own inherent quality; 
that is, convenience. It must be possible to buy 
them conveniently, and they must be convenient 
to use. We don't usually think of this element of 
convenience when we consider good marketing 
because we do not think of our time and trouble 
as part of the cost of what we buy. But the effi- 
cient manufacturer or dealer doesn't forget it for 
a moment. He makes his chief profit by appealing 
to our convenience. He does crackers up in pack- 
ages and delivers them at our door at a telephone 
call, or on the receipt of a postal. He knows that 
this is far easier for us than to walk a mile, buy 
them out of a barrel, and escort them home in a 
paper bag. He makes it easier for us to buy jelly 
than to make it, to buy our hats than to make 
them, to get everything as nearly as possible in the 
form and place where we are going to use it. 

But things cost so much that way! Of course 
they do — in money. Says one* Western mother: 

"If you will consult the items of how I dressed 
my daughter on fifty dollars a year during her 
college course, you will find that I had to go 
bargain-hunting, leave early in the morning and 
be at the store when it opened. Many a time I 



124 Increasing Home Efficiency 

came home again without having found a bargain, 
but everything I did buy was a bargain." 

Was her daughter cheaply dressed in anything 
but the money cost? And yet this would generally 
be considered as good, efficient buying. What 
more is there to it than to get a good thing for as 
little money as possible.'* 

Those who do not hold with this bargain-hunting 
view cry out that we must get rid of the middleman 
and keep his profits ourselves. Perhaps so. The 
man who grows a turnip and then eats it himself 
has eliminated the middleman so far as that turnip 
is concerned and gets his turnip at the mere cost 
of his own exertions. If that is a cheap price to 
pay, let us proceed to the extermination of the 
middleman. There is a movement in New York 
City toward efficient housekeeping, whose presi- 
dent is quoted as saying: 

"There will be an eifort on the part of house- 
wives to buy direct from the farmers. It will bene- 
fit them both. The housewives will revive the 
public markets. Please be sure of that." 

Now, these women do not mean a market that 
is necessarily publicly owned and operated — they 
mean a place set aside by the community where 
buyer and producer can come together. There is 
just one point in favor of such markets — the de- 
crease in money cost to the consumer. And it's 
no new thing to try to save money by patronizing 
them. Away back in the sixteenth century the 
Bishop of Lincoln advised his widowed kinswoman 
to save herself of her income by going twice in the 



The Home and the Market 125 

year to the great public fairs to make the chief of 
her purchases — her wine, her wax, and her ward- 
robe — because she could get them at a less price 
than from the traveling peddlars, who were the 
middlemen of her day. It was good advice — in 
sixteenth century England, a primitive community. 

A few weeks ago Mrs. North, the wife of a pro- 
fessional man in Ontario, wrote us: 

"We have a large garden, for which the head of 
the family cares, where we raise all vegetables 
needed and a number of small fruits. 

"I believe that the explanation of the cheapness 
of foods here is that we have an old-fashioned 
market. Every Tuesday, Thursday and Satur- 
day farmers from miles around drive into the city 
to market. The market-house is reserved for 
dealers in butter, eggs and poultry, cream and 
cheese. We have splendid displays of each com- 
modity. The middlemen are absent altogether. 
My lady and my lord as well as those of humbler 
origin wend their way to market, and on Saturday 
mornings especially there are great crowds of 
buyers and sellers. Meat is sold in stalls around 
the market square, and some people buy by the 
quarter. In this climate It is possible to buy In 
large quantities if desired. Everywhere you look 
you will see people carrying fowls by the legs, and 
no one scorns to carry a market-basket." 

Mrs. North is taking the best way in a primitive 
community in Ontario which she says is "seventy 
miles from a trolley car." If we reduce time to 
terms of industrial progress, most of us look back 



126 Increasing Home Eflfieiency 

as far to Mrs. North living in Ontario today as we 
do to the Bishop of Lincoln, dead four hundred 
years. But only in buying green vegetables, dairy 
products, and fruit grown in the neighborhood can 
Mrs. North use the public market. She cannot 
buy her summer dresses direct from the cotton- 
growers of Texas, her crackers from the wheat 
farms of Dakota, her shoes from the ranchmen of 
Arizona, or her books from either the men that 
gather the stuff that makes paper or from us who 
write. The reductio ad absurdum is easy. 

Of course it might be worth while reviving the 
public market just for the sale of provisions if the 
saving were great enough, but the money saving 
has got to be balanced against the cost in conven- 
ience and labor. 

Dubuque, Iowa, has a much talked of pubHc 
market. On every Saturday from three hundred 
to four hundred teams bring produce into the city 
and a space of six linear blocks is given up to the 
sale of it. On Saturday, September i6th, 191 1, 

Apples sold at 25 to 35 cents per bushel. 
Butter at 27>^ cents per pound. 
Sweetcorn at 10 cents per dozen ears. 
Dressed chickens at 90 cents to $1.00 a pair. 
Small cucumbers for pickHng at 75 to 90 cents a 

bushel. 
Eggs at 20 cents per dozen. 
Grapes at 2 cents per pound. 
New potatoes at 60 cents per bushel. 
Tomatoes at 35 cents per bushel. 



The Home and the Market 127 

But the other side of this pleasing picture comes 
from a woman in a similar part of the country. 

"I should like to give you the country woman's 
view of the public market and the problem of sup- 
plying *Mrs. Watrous' with food," she writes. 
"I should like to relieve my mind. No doubt you 
have seen laudatory articles on the Des Moines 
Public Market and how they are slaughtering high 
prices. My father owns a farm about twelve miles 
south of Des Moines which he rents. Last summer 
there were some fine apples going to waste in the 
orchard, and our tenant thought he would sell 
them in the much advertised public market. He 
and his wife and four children worked a day, hand- 
picking the apples and loading them. He started 
for Des Moines at one o'clock in the morning so as 
to be there when the market opened at 6.00 a. m. 
He sat in the broiling sun, dickering out apples a 
peck at a time. Every woman who came to buy 
took all the time she wanted to pick out her ap- 
ples and beat him down in the price. When the 
market closed at 4:30 p. m., his load was not half 
sold and he had taken in but $2.30, small change. 
Not even a day's wages for himself and team, be- 
sides his night travel and the work of his wife and 
children! The Commission Houses would not 
bother with half a load of apples. He was utterly 
disgusted. He drove out of the city, backed his 
wagon down a ditch by the roadside, dumped his 
apples into it and drove home. You may be sure 
that neither he nor his neighbors will ever take 
anything to the market again. Whatever the 



128 Increasing Home Efficiency 

citizens of Des Moines may think, the wide awake 
Iowa farmer, — the kind who plows with a six- 
horse team or a gas engine, — has not time to bother 
with it." 

If the time the farmer takes to sell his stuff, and 
the time the buyer takes to select and dicker for 
the goods, is of no value, then a public market may 
be a community economy. But in a developed 
society in which labor is specialized, the time of a 
trained truck gardener or agriculturist is too pre- 
cious to be taken from his job, and the time of the 
amateur buyer might be better spent at his pro- 
fession or trade. With our growing specialization 
of labor, time has become too precious for such 
primitive traffic. 

When people deplore the passing of this form of 
public market, they act as though it had gone 
through somebody's fault. But nobody can forci- 
bly amputate an industrial institution from so- 
ciety as though it were an arm or a leg; such in- 
stitutions disappear, like our ancestral gill-slits 
and swimming-bladders, because they have be- 
come useless. Nobody went out and feloniously 
slaughtered the unprotected public market; civil- 
ization simply stole away and left it to starve, 
as is the inhuman habit of advancement gen- 
erally. 

Of course we do still have a kind of public market 
even in some of our great cities, like Baltimore and 
Washington and New York, but they are not 
haunts of the producer by any means; they shelter 
the middleman just as truly as the great wholesale 



The Home and the Market 129 

grocery does, and yet, even so, they are sometimes 
an economy — in money. 

"We save a good deal of money by buying our 
meats, fish, eggs, butter, and vegetables in Wash- 
ington Market" (a public market in lower Man- 
hattan), writes a Brooklyn gentleman. "We there 
get the benefit of cash purchases, but, as they do 
not deliver, we are obliged to carry our purchases 
home ourselves. I generally meet my wife after 
office hours for this purpose. How much we save 
was shown the other day when we had unexpected 
company to dinner. I was sent to the nearest 
butcher for eight lamb chops. They cost eighty- 
three cents. We could have bought them for half 
that in Washington Market." 

This Brooklyn gentleman and his wife must 
spend at least twenty cents carfare each time they 
go to Washington Market, probably twice that, 
unless they are good walkers; they must spend an 
hour apiece, at a minimum, and they must carry 
their stuff home. All these are part of the cost of 
their purchases. They have eliminated the cost of 
delivery boys, and telephones, by becoming delivery 
boys themselves. If the time of the delivery boy 
is more valuable than their own, then they are 
buying economically. 

Baltimore is trying to get rid of its public mar- 
ket, and Washington ought to, because they are 
unsanitary. The horses that bring in the produce 
to be sold and wait in the neighborhood to haul 
the profits home provide meanwhile the best breed- 
ing-ground for the "typhoid fly," which crawls 



130^ Increasing Home EflSeiency 

delightedly over the food exposed for our buying; 
waste accumulates, and perfect cleaning is diffi- 
cult. It is significant that the typhoid prevalence 
and death rates of Baltimore and Washington have 
been and are exceptionally high, and that the re- 
cent investigations of the United States Hygienic 
Laboratory into the Origin and Prevalence of 
Typhoid Fever in the District of Columbia trace 
the source of typhoid not primarily to the water 
supply, but to food stuffs, — milk, green vege- 
tables and shell fish, — that are exposed to con- 
tamination through excessive human contact and 
excessive exposure to the typhoid fly. 

Mr. Paul C. Wilson of the New York Bureau of 
Municipal Research has made a special investiga- 
tion of the public markets of New York City. He 
says that five of them were abolished in 1903 by a 
resolution of the Board of Aldermen because the 
Health Department reported their condition as 
unsanitary, the Borough President reported that 
they needed large expenditures for repairs, and 
the Comptroller reported that they were being 
run at a considerable deficit. Of the six that re- 
main he says: 

"The great bulk of the business in these public 
markets is wholesale in character, therefore they 
afford only slight convenience or economic advan- 
tage to the consumer. While two of the six appeal 
to patrons who are not compelled to practice 
economy, the other four are devoted practically 
exclusively to wholesale trade in so far as they sell 
food stuffs at all. The consumer is prevented or 



The Home and the Market 131 

discouraged from purchasing. A large number of 
stalls are rented by the large packing interests 
for the preparation and distribution of meat to 
retail butchers. Last summer the so-called poul- 
try trust rented five stalls in West Washington 
Market which it actually did not use for business 
purposes other than to prevent the use of that 
space by its competitors. The stalls were rented 
from the city, paid for by the poultry trust and 
left locked, vacant and unused." 

These public markets, like our public utilities 
generally, — gas, oil, electricity, transportation, — 
have been used not to the advantage of the con- 
sumer, but by the large business organizations 
against the consumer and for their own extortion- 
ate profit. The net annual average deficit in the 
city treasury for these markets in the ten years 
preceding 1910 was ^92,569.09. 

In considering the question whether markets 
could be established in New York where the 
farmers and consumers would really deal directly 
with each other, Mr. Wilson says : 

*It seems doubtful whether the farmer would 
willingly lose the additional time required In mak- 
ing sales to the consumer when he can sell his en- 
tire daily produce to a wholesaler. Likewise it 
is doubtful whether large numbers of the consumers 
in New York City would frequent such markets 
at the expense of personal inconvenience and loss 
of time." 

In view of this expert opinion, it is evident that 
even if we did buy cheaply at the public market, 



132 Increasing Home Efficiency 

it would be at the cost of cleanliness and conven- 
ience, the things for which we pay the private 
dealer; that we do not get rid, either of the middle- 
man or the controlling trusts, but only of the 
delivery boy; and that we are individually profit- 
ing by a big deficit in the city treasury. 

To have the cities maintain public markets in 
order to bring the middlemen together for the 
sake of substituting our time and labor and that 
of the farmer for that of the delivery boy is a 
doubtful social economy. Rather we want the 
grocer and butcher in our block, so that the man 
of the house can leave the order on his way to 
work, or so that the tradesman can still further 
save our time by sending his boy for orders. There7 
fore, small stores multiply, even though we pay 
an excessive price for their convenience. We pay 
the small grocer excessively for the excessive risk 
he takes, for his ignorance of the best methods of 
handling (because he is not always' an expert), 
and for the cost of his competition with the next 
grocer up the street. 

Let us show how great this excess is by compar- 
ing what * Mrs. North, of Ontario, spends to feed 
her family, with what Mr. Calvert, of Pittsburg, 
pays to feed his. Both Mr. North and Mr. Cal- 
vert are professional men. Their families do not 
differ materially in their ideals of comfort or 
pleasure or clothes. Both use vacuum cleaners 
and electric irons, both have dispensed with a 
resident maid and depend on outside help, and 

* See page 125. 



The Home and the Market 133 

yet, In spite of these similarities, one family spends 
$900 a year for food and the other $240. This is 
at the rate of nearly seventy-five cents a day for 
an adult man in one case, and less than twenty- 
six cents in the other. Mrs. North raises part of 
her food and buys the rest at the public market, 
without paying big or little middleman's profits 
for most of it. 

"Anything free in Pittsburg?" writes Mr. Cal- 
vert. "No. It takes hard cash in every case to 
get what we want. Nine hundred dollars seems 
a lot for food, but wife Is saving. Nothing is 
wasted. We procure the best the market affords, 
but do not entertain much, and are as plain in our 
eating as in our dress." 

Now, Mr. Calvert would find it neither possible 
nor profitable to follow Mrs. North's example. 
Even if he could buy direct from the producer — 
which he can't — it would cost more inconvenience, 
time, and labor than he could afford to pay. How 
many million years a day would be wasted if we all 
went to market and brought home our purchases! 

Next to buying direct from the producer, the 
favorite road to economy seems to be to buy every- 
thing at wholesale — nothing in small quantities. 
A good many people advocate this course. They 
say: 

"Flour should be bought by the barrel and kept 
in a warm, dry place" (or a cool, dry place — opin- 
ions differ). 

"Buy your soap by the box and stand the bars 
on the shelf to harden." 



134 Increasing Home Efficiency 

"Buy your winter supply of potatoes in the fall 
and store them in a cool, dark cellar." 

"I find it economical to buy coffee in twenty- 
four-pound boxes; keep it dry and warm, and 
grind it as needed." 

"By buying the muslin for underwear by the 
piece, I save many yards in the bolt." 

"Several barrels of apples should be bought in 
the late summer and kept in the fruit cellar till 
wanted." 

"Keep your carrots, turnips, and other winter 
vegetables under a light layer of earth in the cel- 
lar." (In New York earth even for flowers costs 
fifty cents a bucket, and cellars are rented by the 
square foot for sleeping purposes.) 

"Store your old pieces of carpet in the attic. 
When you have a quantity on hand, they may be 
woven into presentable rag rugs." 

"I have found that I save money by putting 
down several cases of eggs in water glass for winter 
use. By buying them last summer we have had 
eggs all winter at twenty-three cents a dozen, 
while other people have been paying twice that 
much." 

A cellar, an attic, cool fruit closets, warm store- 
rooms, barrels of apples and of flour, of sugar and 
potatoes, shelves full of breakfast food and soap 
and sheeting, boxes of coffee, crates of fruit, cases 
of eggs, gallons of oil — in a modern flat where 
would the people stay.^ 

What this limitation of space means to the city 
buyer we know from experience. We lived for a 



The Home and the Market 135 

year on the fourth floor of a tenement in the 
crowded East Side of New York. Our only source 
of heat was a coal stove. We had to choose be- 
tween the laundry tub and the bathtub for a coal- 
bin. Necessarily we had to buy it by the sack, 
which, elevated to our flat by foot power, cost us 
eighteen dollars a ton for the same quality that 
the dealers were selling at six dollars and seventy- 
five cents. We had the wide choice between pay- 
ing this price and going without heat. Of course 
part of the trouble was that a flat with no store- 
room was allowed to be built. We were up against 
the city building laws, and there was no way of 
efficiently buying coal in that place without chang- 
ing them. 

But of course not everybody lives in flats. Lack 
of space ought not to prevent the thousands of 
middle-class housewives, especially in the suburbs 
or country, from buying at wholesale. It doesn't 
— they have other dragons to fight. A Stamford, 
Connecticut, woman, very anxious to make her 
housekeeping a smooth-running machine, said to 
us: 

"I've tried out this buying in quantity idea. 
I estimated how much breakfast food and flour 
and sugar and canned goods and dried fruits and 
winter vegetables we would need, mentally fitted 
them into our cellar and storeroom, took a day to 
go to New York and order them from a wholesale 
place. They came, and of course we had to pay 
the freight charges to Stamford, which were high. 
As they couldn't walk up from the depot them- 



136 Increasing Home Eflficiency 

selves, we had to pay express charges, which were 
higher yet. But even after I had spent a day get- 
ting them stored safely away, I figured out that 
I had saved a good sum of money on the deal. 
But who shall guarantee the staying power of a 
beet! Things spoiled if I kept the cellar too warm, 
and froze if I let it get cold — you know we have 
real weather in Stamford! Mice appeared in the 
house, and the paper wrappers around cereals were 
just appetizers to them, and what the mice didn't 
spoil the mildew did. A musty taste came into the 
flour, and something happened to the sugar. Only 
the things in cans kept. By spring I had thrown 
away so much that what we had actually eaten 
had cost far more than as if we had bought it in 
the highest market." 

"Perhaps you didn't take proper care of the 
things?" we suggested. 

"Obviously!" she answered, with a magnificent 
scorn born of money loss. 

We talked with a man who once lived in a big 
country house with ample cellars and attics. 

"You used to buy your vegetables and fruits 
in large quantities. Did it pay?" 

"Well," he said, doubtfully, "it paid, because 
there wasn't anything else to do. The markets 
were some distance away, and not very good at 
that. But we had to go through the cellar occa- 
sionally and pick out the things that were rotting. 
There were a good many of them, and we seemed 
to be always eating specked apples to save them." 

When you buy from the retail grocer, you don't 



The Home and the Market 137 

have to take specked apples, nor moldy cereal, 
nor damaged flour. You can demand and get 
supplies in good condition. The labor of storing 
things properly and the risk of deterioration are 
upon him. You pay him for this in profits instead 
of standing the risk yourself. And from the stand- 
point of the community, isn't it a saving of work 
to let him as an expert (which he should be, though 
he often isn't) do well what you as an ill-equipped 
amateur would probably do badly .^ From the 
facts, not the theories, which we have come at, it 
appears that wholesale buying by the individual 
home is not an economy where it can be avoided; 
that it is easier to let the grocery be our storeroom 
once removed; the butcher shop, the refrigerator 
of a neighborhood; the department store, our well- 
ordered cellar and attic combined. From every 
standpoint but that of money saving, it is the 
eificient thing to do, and most of us are doing it. 
Convenience calls so loudly! But in the matter 
of convenience, just as in the matter of quality, 
we run head-on into the matter of price. The 
best and most convenient things cost more than 
we can afford. How is the efficient buyer going 
to climb the money wall.^ 

We sent out a little Noah's dove of a question- 
naire, and it brought back (besides accounts of 
wholesale buying) the meat boycott, the sales- 
man's suggestion of something just as good as the 
genuine, the simple old-fashioned device of going 
without, and some experiments in cooperation. 
Why do we think of cooperation as something we 



138 Increasing Home Efficiency 

are not already practicing? Why do we seem to 
regard it as the social equivalent of a bomb ? The 
only difference between a cooperative buying 
plant and an ordinary store is that in one case 
some man or company says: 

"Go to; let me establish the Great A. B. C. 
Emporium. I will furnish the neighborhood with 
supplies and repay myself with profits." 

And in the other case the neighborhood says: 

"Go to; let us establish the Great A. B. C. 
Emporium. We will furnish ourselves with sup- 
plies and pay a man wages to run it for us." 

From almost every State come accounts of these 
cooperative buying clubs. Now they deal in 
farm implements, now in eggs, now in dry goods 
and general merchandise. The little towns of 
Michigan and Minnesota and Kansas and Oregon 
are leaving provincial New York City behind. 

"As to cooperation," writes a Minnesota wo- 
man, "the farmers in the State frequently form 
corporations under the State laws to own stores. 
It takes from four to five years to make these 
enterprises pay, but most of them do pay eventu- 
ally, and the middleman's profit is cut out. I 
know of two cooperative stores. The farmers 
who own them aim to keep everything needed on a 
farm, not dealing in the finer kinds of dry goods, 
shoes, etc. They are general or department stores, 
and are well patronized not only by the stock- 
holders who own them, but by their friends and 
neighbors." 

The English cooperatives pay, and the Belgian, 



The Home and the Market 139 

and so do many more, and for the simple reason 
that the middleman is made a household steward, 
once removed, and put on wages. He manages the 
cooperative at a fixed rate, which is sometimes 
less than the profits he was getting, sometimes 
more, but in either case he has the advantage of 
certainty. 

Is the cooperative buying club, then, the solu- 
tion of efficient marketing? In Panama they have 
worked out a step beyond it. 

In 1894 the high officials of the Panama Railroad 
organized a cooperative buying club, because the 
Panama merchants not only charged exorbitant 
prices, but did not carry such things as were 
wanted. There were twenty families in the orig- 
inal undertaking. It succeeded, and was bought 
by the United States Government ten years later 
with the Panama Railroad and put under the Com- 
missary Department. The annual report of the 
Canal Commission for 1907 says: 

"Supplies are furnished to the hotels, messes, 
kitchens, and employes by the Commissary De- 
partment, which has developed into a modern de- 
partment store." 

The report for the next year says : 

"Through thirteen branch stores along the line 
of work the Commissary supplies ice, meats, bread, 
pies, cakes, ice-cream, and groceries of all kinds, 
as well as laundry service." 

Mr. Albert Edwards, who has recently lived in 
Panama, writes: 

"In one respect the Commissary is not like a 



I40 Increasing Home EflSciency 

department store. It does not sell shoddy cloth 
nor adulterated food." 

No need in Panama for every woman to be her 
own expert! 

"This does not sound like good business," he 
continues. "Nevertheless, the price of beefsteaks 
has gone steadily down — and other things in pro- 
portion — just at the time when the cost of living 
has been aeroplaning most dizzily in the States." 

In 1910 the "Canal Record" said: 

"In the United States at present the average 
price of live cattle is higher than at any time since 
1882, and the average price of hogs is higher than 
at any time since the Civil War. The reduction 
of the price of meat in the face of these high prices 
in the States is possible because of economies that 
have been effected in running the Commissary 
system. The reduction in the price of meat has 
been gradual but constant during the past year. 
On January 17, 1909, porterhouse steak cost 
twenty-nine cents a pound at the Commissary; on 
February first the price was reduced to twenty- 
seven cents; on May 30, it was selling at twenty- 
five cents a pound, but as soon as the new meat 
contract went into effect the price was reduced to 
twenty-two cents, and it remained at twenty-two 
cents till February i, 1910, when it was reduced 
to twenty-one cents." 

"Despite the hoary tradition of our political 
economy," says Mr. Edwards, "hardly a month 
passes when the 'Canal Record' does not note 
some new economy which has been developed — 



The Home and the Market 141 

"some new nail driven into the coffin of middle- 
men's profits." 

This is probably the only instance where a co- 
operative marketing association is being run by 
the American Government. Some of the army 
officers are organizing such an association in New 
York State, but only as members of any other pro- 
fession might do it. The significant thing is that 
the government-operated market of Panama is 
giving the whole community a combination of 
quality, convenience, and cheapness that so far 
we have been unable to get in any other way. And 
the people of the United States are doing this be- 
cause they have recognized that this great social 
enterprise, the Panama Canal, cannot be carried 
through unless the best is brought within the reach 
of every worker — the best^ as Mrs. Watrous insists, 
is his right and our advantage. 

The function of the home marketer Is a much 
bigger one than just to go out and buy things. It 
isn't to get something better than somebody else 
because you know quality, to get something 
cheaper than somebody else because you have a 
pull, to buy a poorer quality than somebody else 
because you can make it do. 

What Is it, then.? 

Obviously, to get the best thing because nothing 
else will do, and to get it for the least outlay of 
brains and muscle and money, and to get it not 
only for yourself but for all the community. Not 
to go without, not to substitute Inferior quality 
for good, not to step back Into individual produc- 



142 Increasing Home Efficiency 

tion or in any way substitute the work of the hand 
for the work of the brain and dollar; but through 
the most convenient channels to get the things we 
need, in order that we may give to society the 
best possible output in manhood and womanhood 
from all our homes. 



CHAPTER VIII 
A Housekeeper's Defense of the Trusts 

ON the 15th of May, 191 1, Ellis Howe, our 
next door neighbor, came swinging down 
the road from the station with a smile that 
looked as if the company had doubled his salary. 

"Well, it's out, and they've soaked 'em!" he 
shouted to his wife as soon as he got within ear-shot 
of the veranda. 

" Out ? What's out ? " she called back pleasantly. 

"Why, the oil decision, of course; the govern- 
ment won, the trust is dissolved, we'll get our 
chance yet!" 

Ellis Howe was much excited. We knew that 
there was an old feud between his family and the 
oil trust which had got away with his father's wells 
some twenty years before, and now as his voice 
boomed across the lawn that separated our houses, 
we realized that this oil decision was a personal 
matter with him. The Supreme Court had smitten 
Ellis Howe's enemy hip and thigh, and might de- 
liver his father's oil wells into his hand. 

"Isn't it great!" he cried, holding up the big 
black headlines for his wife to see. 

But Mrs. Howe met her husband's enthusiasm 
calmly. We knew that her father had been a 

143 



144 Increasing Home EflBcieney 

dashing speculator and had made and lost a dozen 
fortunes. She was used to big expectations and 
small returns, and didn't think them a fair ex- 
change for a steady salary when there was a young 
family to consider. Also, she had ideas of her 
own. 

"What do you think this decision will do?" she 
asked rather vaguely. 

"Do?" he repeated with surprise. "Do? Why, 
it'll do a whole lot! It isn't the oil trust only; it's 
the meat trust, and the wool trust, and the steel 
trust, and the lumber and sugar trusts, and the 
whole leechy lot of them! They'll all be busted! 
Trade'll be free again, we'll have competition, and 
prices will get down where they belong. It ought 
to cut the cost of living in half. Do? It'll do 
everything!" 

About a month later we ran into the Howes' for 
an after-dinner cup of coffee. Things had been 
moving fast in the world. The Sherman law, 
people said, was making good. Another Supreme 
Court decision had been handed down, the steel 
and sugar trusts had been under the probe of a 
Congressional committee, and Judge Gary had 
startled business with his famous suggestion for 
the government regulation of industrial monop- 
olies. Ellis Howe was sitting under an electric 
lamp, reading the Tobacco Decision as though it 
were a new novel. 

"This," said he, slapping the document ap- 
provingly, "is the greatest thing since the Emanci- 
pation Proclamation! It means the liberation of 



A Housekeeper's Defense of the Trusts 145 

the entire community from economic slavery. It 
means the return of prosperity. It means — " 

But Mrs. Howe, who had paused at her desk 
where our practiced and shrinking eyes discerned 
a pile of household bills, checked what promised to 
be a splendid flight of his oratorical aeroplane. 

"Ellis," she said, "I wish you could manage to 
have a date fixed when we might expect the prom- 
ised benefits of restored competition to flood In 
upon us. I have failed to observe any of them In 
active operation." 

Howe looked at his wife as one floundering after 
an unexpected descent. 

"My dear, you don't seem to understand," he 
said patronizingly. "The courts — " 

"I understand these! ^^ She flourished aloft a 
handful of bills. "There's no drop In the price of 
provisions visible to the naked eye. Kerosene 
flows tranquilly on at thirteen cents a gallon, the 
grocer's bill, the butcher's bill, and the dry-goods 
bill grow like Jack's bean stalk, and the milk has 
got elephantiasis, though I understand that the 
milk trust was * busted' fifteen years ago. Be- 
sides," she added somewhat Irrelevantly, "haven't 
I heard you say, time and time again, that the big 
modern business combinations could give us better 
and cheaper things than the small dealers.^ I 
certainly get better dress goods at the big stores 
than at Miss Wade's Notion Bazaar. If it's the 
trusts that do this, why bust them.^" 

Howe looked at his wife In despair. 

"My dear," he said, "you're a wonder! Where 



146 Increasing Home Efficiency 

would the small business man come in if all the 
business worth doing were monopolized. Can't 
you see that it's a plain business proposition?" 

"Business proposition! Well, what is business 
for, then?" came the feminine question. "Is it 
just to keep the world occupied doing and undoing 
things as I used to keep Clara quiet stringing 
beads ? Or is it to get the world's larder into shape 
so that the children of men may have food and 
clothing and shelter in the easiest and most 
scientific way? I don't really see that it's to the 
advantage of any one but the small business man 
himself to keep him going. Why even the New 
York Times lifts its cherubic voice to heaven one 
day In praise of the * trust-busting' decisions that 
have * brought back competition' and saved the 
country, and the next day informs us that we 
needn't expect any reduction in prices. Now can 
you tell me what good it does to 'bust trusts' If 
we've got to spend as much to live afterward as 
we did before?" 

We found ourselves laughing. 

"Do you mean, Mrs. Howe," one of us asked, 
"that we have these 'trust-busting' campaigns to 
distract people just as the Romans used to have 
gladiatorial contests to take people's minds off the 
high price of bread?" 

"Exactly! And we can't afford such expensive 
amusements as that. What's the use of having 
these two telephone bills, for Instance?" shaking 
them wrathfully. "It's a lot of bother to find 
out which line anybody's on, and an extra check to 



A Housekeeper's Defense of the Trusts 147 

write! Oh, Vm not for having these combinations 
broken up — not at all! Why, when the street car 
lines in New York were all in one company, I could 
transfer almost anywhere and ride all over the city 
for five cents, but now that they've got separated 
into their original companies again, I have to pay 
several fares instead of one. You men may fight 
the trusts as though you thought they were orig- 
inal sin, but I find it very inconvenient and ex- 
pensive to have them busted. If it's only a ques- 
tion of their making too much money, why not 
keep them working and pay them less.'^" 

"Now listen to that!" laughed Ellis Howe. 
"You talk as if the trusts were your washwoman 
and you could put them on wages. Do you think 
they'd stand for it.^" 

"The New York Gas Company had to," replied 
his wife. "I know about that fight, because I was 
doing settlement work down on the East Side when 
it was on." 

And she told how the gas combine had actually 
charged more than the trafiic would bear; how in 
spite of the new meters, where they could buy gas 
by dropping a quarter in the slot, instead of mak- 
ing a five dollar deposit, the people who had to use 
gas for fuel because their flats were too small to 
have storage room for coal, simply got to the point 
where they neither could nor would pay a dollar 
a thousand feet for gas. 

"They made eighty-cent gas a political slogan," 
said she. "I used to lean out of my window on 
Rivington Street, and listen night after night to 



148 Increasing Home EflSciency 

men speaking from soap boxes on the corner. 
Whenever they said 'eighty-cent gas,' the crowd 
cheered. There may have been other political 
issues in other parts of the city — I don't know. 
But down there in the Ghetto nobody seemed to 
care who the various candidates were, or what they 
promised; all they wanted was eighty-cent gas, 
and they would have it." 

Everybody knows now how the people got what 
they wanted. They put through a law fixing the 
price at eighty cents, and the Consolidated Gas 
Company, which was a legalized combination of 
six smaller companies, immediately began to fight. 
They claimed that they could not manufacture 
and sell gas at eighty cents, and that a law re- 
quiring them to do so was confiscatory, and there- 
fore unconstitutional. The case turned on the 
point of just what part of their capitalization was 
water and what was legitimate investment. In 
the process of squeezing out the water, the Su- 
preme Court disposed of eight million dollars' 
worth of good-will and twelve million dollars' worth 
of franchise. Yet after leaving in gift franchises 
as worth $7,781,000 — because in 1884, when the 
consolidation was made, watered stock was legally 
issued to that amount and the holders of this stock 
were entitled to legal protection — the United 
States Supreme Court found that eighty-cent 
gas would yield just about a six per cent return 
and that under the circumstances six per cent was 
not confiscatory. 

"The really important thing about that deci- 



A Housekeeper's Defense of the Trusts 149 

slon," one of us ventured, "isn't the fact that the 
people got eighty-cent gas, nor even the precedent 
of judicially squeezing the water out of over- 
capitalized corporations, but the thing on which 
the court didn't lay any particular stress — the 
establishment of the right of the people to limit 
the profits of public service corporations to so 
modest a rate as six per cent." 

"Just what I said," cried Mrs. Howe triumph- 
antly. "Pay the monopolies, put them on a basis 
of six per cent, or four! The New York people 
didn't try to 'bust' the gas company into its orig- 
inal companies, they didn't want a lot of little 
firms to furnish gas, any more than I want a lot 
of little stoves instead of one big furnace to heat 
my house. They simply reduced the wages of their 
servant, the gas monopoly. I say let's keep the 
trusts; treat them as literal servants of the people. 
Don't just regulate them; put them on a Maxi- 
mum Wage! And if that won't work, let's own 
them." 

The more we reflected upon the matter, the more 
Mrs. Howe's housekeeper's view of the problem 
appealed to us. "What is business for anyway," 
we found ourselves asking, "except to feed and 
clothe and house the human race.^ How shall the 
real worth of industry be judged except as it aids 
or hinders human conservation.^ What other 
standard of value can there be than human life?" 

To take a concrete example: What is the human 
significance of nine-cent-a-quart milk in New York 
City and the hundred and twenty per cent dividend 



150 Increasing Home Efficiency 

recently earned by a member of the milk combine? 
Of course, theoretically, the milk combine is 
"busted," and the troubles of the city are due to 
the greed of the farmer and the eccentricities of 
the cow. Theoretically! 

For in November, 1909, the milk dealers of 
New York, obeying some mysterious common 
impulse, raised the price of milk from eight to 
nine cents a quart. New York uses two million 
quarts a day, so that the one cent increase footed 
up to about twenty thousand dollars a day for the 
dealers. This happened just after the autumn 
rains with plenty of grass in the pastures; but when 
the people raised a howl, the dealers put all the 
blame on the cow. They said that they had been 
compelled to raise the price because there was a 
shortage in the supply. The State's Attorney- 
General decided to have a look-in on this alleged 
queer conduct of our bovine working class. So he 
appointed Mr. John B. Coleman, as his special 
deputy, to call witnesses and to take testimony. 

As the investigation opened, the dealers with- 
drew their little joke about the cows, and shifted 
the blame to the farmers. They said that they 
had been compelled to raise the price because the 
farmers had caught the American habit of extrava- 
gance and were asking unreasonable prices for their 
milk. 

Later they shifted the blame again, this time to 
the consumer. They said that the people were 
demanding such high class service, and the cost of 
handling had consequently so increased, that 



A Housekeeper's Defense of the Trusts 151 

there was nothing in it for them at eight cents a 
quart. They had been philanthropists long enough 
and now they simply had to increase the price or 
go out of business. 

Familiar story! We've heard it each time we've 
had to go deeper into our pockets for oil, or meat, 
or woolen socks, or any of the other things we 
absolutely need to keep alive. 

Now check off the facts. 

Expert evidence showed that the average price 
paid by the dealers to the farmers during the year 
immediately preceding the raise in price was ac- 
tually a little under the price they had paid the 
year before, and that for two years the farmers had 
been getting on an average from three and a 
third to three and a half cents a quart for their 
milk, whereas it had actually cost them from 
three and a fifth to four cents to produce it. The 
farmers had kept on selling to the milk combine, 
because they had no other market. 

And the luxurious consumers.^ An examination 
of the dealers' books by a certified public account- 
ant showed that one company, whose total capital 
stock in 1909 was twenty-five million dollars, of 
which over fifteen millions had been issued against 
trade-marks, patents, and good-will (pure water 
the experts declared) — showed total net profits 
for the year of ^2,617,029.40 representing an 
earning of nearly twenty-eight per cent on 
the total invested capital, water excluded. An- 
other of the dealers, who said he would have to go 
out of business if the price continued at eight cents, 



152 Increasing Home Efficiency 

had his company capitalized at five hundred thou- 
sand dollars, of which two hundred thousand dol- 
lars had been issued for tangible assets, three hun- 
dred thousand dollars representing water. This 
company showed net earnings for the eight months 
immediately preceding the raise to nine cents of 
^257,923.47, which was over one hundred and 
twenty per cent in eight months on the original 
investment. 

When these facts came out in the newspapers, 
the dealers put the price back to eight cents, joy- 
ously proclaiming with one accord that, though 
the month was February, the cows of New York 
and vicinity had got back on their jobs and were 
running a flush of milk. But as soon as the public 
excitement died down and the investigation was 
over, in July, when there is usually an abundance 
of milk, the combine brought out the old joke 
about a shortage and raised the price to nine cents 
again, where it has remained ever since. 

A word of history. The New York milk com- 
bination was organized in 1882. It was "busted" 
under the New York anti-monopoly law in the 
year 1895, after four years of costly litigation. 
Like the Standard Oil and American Tobacco 
Companies, it reorganized so as to be in harmony 
with the law. Says Deputy Coleman in his report 
to the Attorney-General : " It is well-nigh impossi- 
ble for any law against combinations, no matter 
how stringent, to reach the 'gentlemen's agree- 
ment.' It is practically impossible for a prosecut- 
ing officer to prove such an agreement. The 



A Housekeeper's Defense of the Trusts 153 

evidence taken In this investigation shows that 
the consumer (like the farmer) is at i\e mercy of the 
dealers; he must buy milk at their price or go with- 
outy And what is true of milk is true of most 
other commodities, — of oil and meat, cotton and 
lumber and express service, to mention only a few, 
— as any one may learn by consulting the reports of 
the United States Bureau of Corporations or the 
findings of the Interstate Commerce Commission. 
Now for the human significance of this situation. 
That year more than sixteen thousand children 
less than one year of age died in New York City, 
at least one-half of them from preventable causes. 
Experts showed that one of the chief causes of this 
terrible waste of human life was the economic in- 
ability of the mothers to get enough pure milk to 
feed themselves and their babies properly. Surely 
where a combination exists that can dictate terms 
to the producer and the consumer, and for the sake 
of unreasonable profits becomes a party to the 
sacrifice of eight thousand lives a year, the public 
has an interest in that combination. Said Judge 
Waite of the United States Supreme Court : *' Prop- 
erty does become clothed with a public Interest 
when used In a manner to make it of public con- 
sequence, and affect the community at large. 
When one devotes his property to a use in which 
the public has an interest, he grants to the public 
an interest In that use, and must submit to be 
controlled by the public for the common good." 
The milk combine is just as much a monoply as 
though it were legalized by statute, and just as 



154 Increasing Home Efficiency 

much a public service corporation as though it 
held a franchise to pipe milk through the streets. 

Suppose, now, that the people as a first step 
toward the control of the milk monopoly should 
push the price back to eight cents a quart, what 
possible amount of human conservation would the; 
saved twenty thousand dollars a day represent? 
Twenty thousand a day is seven million three hun- 
dred thousand dollars a year. The New York 
Milk Committee has carried on experiments that 
indicate that by the expenditure of only three hun- 
dred thousand dollars a year for doctors, nurses and 
pure milk, practically all of the eight thousand 
babies that now die preventable deaths might be 
saved. But suppose this done; there remain seven 
million dollars a year to be applied to human con- 
servation. This at the same per-capita rate required 
to save the New York babies would go far to 
save all of the one hundred and thirty-seven thou- 
sand five hundred babies that now die every year 
from preventable economic and social causes in the 
country, — a terrible commentary upon the ineffi- 
ciency of our American homes, this needless waste 
of our most valuable product! 

And this calculation still allows the companies 
their earnings of from twenty-eight to one hundred 
and twenty pe^^cent on their actual investments. 

The facts have never been brought together that 
would enable us to establish so intimate a con- 
nection between the waste of human life and the 
steel monopoly, the sugar monopoly, or even the 
meat monopoly that has been revealed between 



A Housekeeper's Defense of the Trusts 155 

the milk monopolies, in the various cities, and the 
infant death rate. But who that has followed the 
history of these monopolies, both in their relation 
to the consumer and to the wage-workers on farm 
or in factory can doubt that there is such a connec- 
tion between their arbitrary control of the funda- 
mental necessaries in the interest of unreasonable 
profits and the statement of the National Conserva- 
tion Commission that one-half of the three million 
persons who are always on the sick list in the 
United States are needlessly sick and that the pre- 
ventable deaths each year in this country foot up 
to the astonishing total of six hundred and thirty 
thousand? 

This is the greatest fact before the nation today 
— the enormous waste of human life that results 
from tyrannical private monopoly. For the first 
time in the history of the world science has given 
us the certainty of plenty; the development of 
business organization on a vast scale has enor- 
mously cheapened the necessary cost of production 
and distribution. Famine and the fear of famine, 
have disappeared. Yet while the coal yards are 
always filled with coal, the price we have to pay 
for coal is outrageous. The cold-storage houses are 
packed with meat to their doors, and scientific 
cattlemen keep a steady tramp of square-rumped 
cattle rattling up the runways of the Chicago 
abattoirs; but the price of meat soars beyond all 
reason. Last autumn a school boy in Georgia 
raised more than two hundred bushels of corn on an 
acre where it used to be said that no corn would 



156 Increasing Home Efficiency- 

grow; but the price of a package of breakfast food 
remains ever the same, while the size of the pack- 
age diminishes. The certainty of plenty, steadi- 
ness of supply, the mastery of the technique of 
distribution so that as a race we need never again 
fear starvation — these are the great gifts that have 
come to us from the evolution of competition into 
monopoly. And yet one is inclined to repeat 
Mrs. Howe's question: "What is business for when 
six hundred and thirty thousand lives are wasted 
every year?" 

And when one stops to think of it, is there any- 
thing so very wild or impracticable in her sugges- 
tion of a maximum wage for corporations? We 
have some mighty good experience to back it. 

While New York was howling for eighty-cent 
gas, Boston adopted its "sliding scale," fixing the 
dividend its gas monopoly might pay. The people 
up there said to their trust: "We'll agree to make 
ninety cents the standard price of gas, and seven 
per cent the standard rate you may pay on your 
legitimate investment. But, to encourage you 
to do your level best, we'll allow you an increase 
of one per cent on your dividends for every five 
cents reduction in the price." In less than two 
years they had eighty-cent gas and a good deal 
more. Louis Brandeis, who had a hand in draft- 
ing the law, says that the officers and employes 
of the company now devote themselves strictly to 
the business of making and distributing gas, in- 
stead of playing the market with their securities 
and working the pork barrel at the State House to 



A Housekeeper's Defense of the Trusts 157 

get special privileges from the legislature. With 
the question of price settled, and dividends meas- 
ured by service, the trust is keeping out of politi- 
cal scandals. 

And in Cleveland they've gone Boston one bet- 
ter. They have a sort of sliding scale there, too, 
but the slide is all on the side of the people. They've 
arranged a scale of street car fares running from 
four cents cash fare, seven tickets for twenty- 
five cents, and one cent for a transfer, down to a 
straight two-cent fare. Then they have limited 
the earning power of the company to a flat six 
per cent on authorized issues of stock. Whenever 
the company accumulates a surplus above five 
hundred thousand dollars by the amount of two 
hundred thousand dollars, the rate of fare drops 
automatically one notch in the scale. They are 
down to a three-cent fare in Cleveland now. 

We dropped these facts into the discussion. 

"Of course," Mr. Howe came back at us, "the 
people have a right to establish a maximum wage, 
as you call it, for such corporations, because they 
operate on franchises that give them the right to 
use public property. Of course you've a right to 
limit their wages, or settle their rates, or make 
them all wear pink hair-ribbons or fleece-lined 
galoshes or anything the courts will allow to be 
reasonable. But have you given any franchise 
to the oil trust, or the sugar trust, or the tin-plate 
trust, or the rubber trust, or the beef trust, or the 
bread trust .^ Of course not! They're not public 
service corporations; they're private business, and 



158 Increasing Home Efficiency 

you have no more right to say what profits they 
shall make under the Constitution than you have 
to tell me how I shall brush my hair. Such inter- 
ference would destroy initiative. That's the great 
difference between strictly private business and 
public service." 

Ellis Howe went up in a pinwheel splutter about 
competition. It was evident that he didn't really 
expect to rival the busted Standard Oil Company 
even if he did miraculously recover his ancestral 
wells; but he somehow seemed to have a supersti- 
tious feeling that anything that struck at the roots 
of free competition struck at the roots of the na- 
tional life. 

Mrs. Howe, on the other hand, was not inter- 
ested in judicial precedent, economic tradition, or 
legislative theory. She wanted her house run well, 
and her family well fed and clothed, and if the 
organization of Big Business could serve her better, 
than competition, she had no theoretic or senti- 
mental scruples against it. 

At the same time, she was equally free from 
theoretic scruples about the sacredness of private 
ownership in Business, Big or Little. She was one 
of those quiet, keen-witted women who have 
their mental eyes perpetually open, so that one is 
always being surprised by the things they have 
seen and know. She was familiar with the Wis- 
consin plan of physical valuation and the limitation 
of profits under state commission control; she had 
studied the Socialist arguments for public owner- 
ship and the abolition of profits; she was even 



A Housekeeper's Defense of the Trusts 159 

familiar with the theories of the French and 
Italian Syndicalists who hold that it would be 
socially advantageous to intrust the industries to 
the workers who operate them. Indeed, she 
startled us by quoting a French authority to prove 
that the late strike of the French postal clerks had 
been mainly a strike for efficiency directed against 
the red tape and amateurish bungling of their un- 
trained political superiors. But she had looked 
into all these matters purely because she had the 
intelligence to see their bearing upon the everyday 
problems of feeding and clothing and educating 
her family. 

"You know, Ellis," she said reflectively, "your 
pugnacious talk about competition and * busting' 
the trusts makes me realize what a crime of omis- 
sion we women have been guilty of ever since the 
spinning-wheel slipped away and left us sitting 
here in semi-idleness. Trusts, and common car- 
riers and public utilities, — what are they all but 
our old household arts grown large ? By them our 
children are clothed and fed, and if our children 
sufl'er, it is because we housewives are not attend- 
ing to our jobs. The great trouble to day is that 
we have too much masculine pugnacity in business 
and too little of it in the home, too much feminin- 
ity in the home and too little of the women's point 
of view in business. We've got to strike a new 
balance, — put business efficiency into the home 
and socialize business by charging it with the spirit 
of equal justice that women have learned in dealing 
with their children. 



i6o Increasing Home Efficiency 

"I doubt whether you will hasten justice or pro- 
mote the common good by merely 'busting' the 
trusts. We need a far more scientific readjust- 
ment than that, — and it is largely up to us women 
to get it." 



CHAPTER IX 
How Shall We Learn to Keep House? 

DO you think people should be taught 
to keep house? And if so, who and 
how and where?" 

The young Chicago stock-broker looked up 
from his breakfast cereal in mild surprise. 

"All women, of course, by their mothers in the 
kitchen," he said. 

It was an inherited answer. He made it just as 
automatically as he digested his food — and just as 
inevitably. It was the companion piece to the 
idea that all men should be taught a trade by their 
fathers in the shop — only it had survived its twin 
by two generations. The stock-broker had still 
in his mind the old apprentice system of women's 
industry, modified by the masculine misapprehen- 
sion that housekeeping takes place in the kitchen. 

In reality there seem to be four ways to learn 
the business of housekeeping; at home from 
" mother," at school from " teacher," at college from 
"professor," and after marriage through university 
work, extension classes, correspondence schools, 
and the work offered by the government through 
the Agricultural Department. 

No, there is another way! One built on Original 
Research and Divine Inspiration! This composite 
method is based on the theory that housekeeping 
i6i 



i62 Increasing Home Efficiency 

is in the class with aeronautics, a new science In 
which the worker has no accumulated information 
to draw on, and that women, just by virtue of be- 
ing women, will know it any way. 

"I don't believe," said one of these original 
investigators of the science of housekeeping, 
"that there is any way to learn to keep house but 
just by doing the work. Everybody is so different, 
they've got to learn it their own way." 

And then she excused herself long enough to 
telephone to the plumber because the kitchen sink 
was stopped up with grease and she had never 
"originally researched" out the effect of boiling 
water and lye on a grease-stopped pipe. Of course, 
she might get to that In time, but why should 
she go through the whole of the race history for 
herself to do it.^* 

Even the moderate use of the needle that all 
housekeepers need to know is no instinctive or 
inherited feminine function. 

A Hull House club was preparing to give a 
Shakespearean play. From motives of economy 
they planned to make the costumes themselves, 
but when the members had all assembled with 
shears and needles and thread it developed that 
not one of the girls could so much as baste two 
straight edges together. Some of the boys could 
sew; they were working in the garment trades; 
but the girls were bookkeepers and clerks, and able 
to do the work for which they had been trained. 
They were part of the industrial organization, not 
housekeepers. Undoubtedly when they married 



How Shall We Learn to Keep House? 163 

they would be no more inspired by cook-stove and 
broom than they were now by needle and thread. 
Obviously, that sort of ignorance does not dispose 
women to marriage, solve the servant problem, 
reduce the cost of living, or increase the birth-rate. 
In every other line of work, from wireless teleg- 
raphy to spelling, we have turned our backs on 
intuition and placed our faith in ordered knowl- 
edge, scientifically imparted. And even in house- 
keeping, the Original Research-Divine Inspira- 
tion school is falling into innocuous desuetude. 

The apprentice system, however, in which 
"mother" teaches "daughter," survives in every 
part of the country and in every class of society. 
It is sanctioned by precedent and tradition, but 
it is no longer in good working order. This is 
partly because "mother" is not always a good 
teacher. She neither knows her subject in the best 
or most modern way, nor has she the pedagogical 
ability to teach what she does know. 

A woman from Wigham, Minnesota, writes 
how she trained her second daughter by this old 
apprentice system. Her schedule of work includes 
turning the feather beds, hemming sheets and pil- 
low cases, putting up mincemeat, and various other 
traditional diversions. Incidentally she remarks 
with sorrow that her son died of typhoid and her 
eldest daughter went to work in a Minneapolis 
store. We asked about the drainage system of 
her town, trying to account for the typhoid, but 
she didn't know anything about It; and when we 
asked what her daughter could have found to do 



164 Increasing Home Efficiency 

if she had staid in Wigham, she said that her hus- 
band was perfectly able to support his family and 
that she believed in girls staying at home. A 
mother whose mental equipment was coeval with 
her feather beds! Isn't it almost inevitable that 
if "mother" learned the methods of her own youth, 
they, and the equipment on which they depend, 
must be antiquated and out of date? That 
"mother" sticks to the methods of mother, — not to 
say grandmother — and will tend to perpetuate 
ways and customs merely because she is used to 
them? Moreover she labors under the disadvan- 
tage of doing her teaching without ordered lessons 
or systematic research. 

We have just been talking with the married 
daughter of an able housekeeper who prides her- 
self on the "practical" training she gives her chil- 
dren. 

"You see 1 don't know how to keep house very 
well," said the bride. "At home mother always 
/ did the hard parts. She couldn't bear to see us 
spoil things." 

But even this apprentice system can be modified 
Into something modern and useful. In Savoy, a 
tiny town In central Illinois, there Is a rural school 
which Is fortunate enough to have Mrs. Nora B. 
Dunlap, President of the Department of House- 
hold Science of the Farmers' Institute, on Its 
Board of Directors. Mrs. Dunlap has succeeded 
in putting the apprentice system under the direc- 
tion of the school. For housekeeping work done 
at home she has Introduced weekly record cards 



How Shall We Learn to Keep House? 165 

which include cleaning the rooms, making the 
beds, setting the table, washing the dishes, laundry 
work, sewing, mending, darning and other things 
a child might do at home. The instruction in the 
best way to do these things is not given by mother 
in the home, but by the trained teacher in the 
school, who follows her students into the home. 
The actual work is done at home, and school credit 
is given for it when the weekly record is signed by 
the parents. This is a new way of recognizing the 
educational value of housework, and of putting 
the apprentice system into the hands of the school 
teacher. Theoretically it should conserve the 
good points of both systems. 

For, after all, there is a lot to be said for the ap- 
prentice system in housekeeping. 

"My brother's wife," said a lady from Bosky- 
dale, Wisconsin, "well, she teaches her two daugh- 
ters herself right in her own kitchen. They're in 
the university in the winter, but in the vacation 
one week one of them is cook and the other cham- 
bermaid, and the next week they change around. 
The girls don't always like it very much, I guess, 
but they've got to do it. And of course my brother 
doesn't have to hire any help when they're at 
home." 

The work necessary to learning housekeeping 
has a money value, and with the apprentice system . 
scientifically conducted, you can earn while you 
learn if need be. Besides it is a practical training 
that develops manual skill through doing real 
things. These home-trained girls would never 



1 66 Increasing Home Efficiency 

come to their mother and say as a girl did to one of 
the Chicago principals: 

"I cooked the dinner at home last night, Miss 
Lane, — and do you know I had to make seven 
omelettes! Why, papa ate three himself I" 

Her mind had not bridged the gap between the 
practice omelette of the school made with one 
egg and the omelette of domesticity made with 
many eggs. , 

Miss Mary S. Snow, head of the Domestic 
Science Department in the Chicago Public Schools, 
would like to bridge this gap by using the German 
system. In this system the students are taught 
to do their work on the basis of five people, the 
number in the average family; the stove they use 
is family size, the marketing is family marketing, 
the utensils are the regulation store-bought sort. 
A real table is set with a meal calculated to feed 
five people, and the service is the sort a family 
having no servant could command. There is 
just one reason why this system is not installed in 
the Chicago Public Schools,— it costs fifteen cents 
per child per day. At present the school board 
has only advanced to the point of spending a cent 
and a half per child per day for domestic science 
equipment. 

But when we remember with what travail that 
Board was prevailed upon to permit the nose of the 
Domestic Science camel under the flap of the Pub- 
lic Education tent, we can hardly believe that 
even so much of the good beast is already inside. 
That camel's nose was disguised as ^instruction in 



How Shall We Learn to Keep House? 167 

cooking"; but it was trained and fed and urged 
forward by women with sufficient brains to see 
that housekeeping is a public concern, and of suffi- 
cient social and financial position to get what they 
wanted — the women of the Chicago Woman's 
Club. 

"You see," said a little lady who had been a 
member of the first Domestic Science Committee, 
"we knew, or we thought we did, that children 
needed to know something more than reading, 
writing and arithmetic, more even than German, 
drawing and music, something that ought to be 
very common indeed, but wasn't — how to keep 
house.^^ She picked up from an old inlaid table 
the blanket she was knitting for a recent grandson. 
"We started in with the cooking. We were will- 
ing (the Woman's Club, you know) to pay for 
everything, but we had to beg and beg and Beg 
before the School Board would give the children a 
chance." She slid out one needle and began to 
knit the great white stitches back onto it again. 
"At last they gave us the use of one bare room in 
one school to start with. My son here designed 
the cooking tables, we bought the stoves and 
dishes, paid for the food, hired the teacher and 
started in to teach." She slipped a few stitches 
along the ivory needles in silence. "Oh, yes, we 
met obstacles," she went on. "Mostly from the 
people in Kenwood, who were a little toppy at 
that time, you remember. They sent word now 
and again that the cooking in their homes was 
done by servants and they didn't care to have their 



1 68 Increasing Home Efficiency 

daughters learn it." She pushed a little further 
back into the Empire chair that was part of her 
inheritance. "They seemed to think, — some of 
them, — that their social position would be en- 
dangered if their daughters knew how to cook." 
She laid her hands in her silken lap to gain em- 
phasis, and her black eyes had the determination 
of those of her pre-Revolutionary ancestor on the 
canvas above. "But, in spite of them," shaking 
a small finger, "we have got Household Economics 
into practically every school in Chicago!" 

And it is true that every girl in Chicago can now 
learn housekeeping in the public schools, and 
housekeeping as interpreted by Miss Snow covers 
a multitude of things. For is it not part of the 
work to know how to buy so as to get full value 
for a cent.^ Is not the canning of fruit, the hem- 
ming of table-cloths, the trimming of hats, as 
much a part of it as the baking of bread and the 
broiling of chops? That Domestic Science camel 
has got so far in that the girls learn how to select 
a flat or house with reference to the needs of any 
given family, they learn what is and is not ade- 
quate plumbing, something of interior decoration 
and furnishing, of public as well as domestic 
sanitation, and are even beginning to take up 
budget-making and the apportionment of the in- 
come. 

There is a Chicago school where the normal 
students practice under the supervision of the 
regular teachers — the practical training of experts 
by experts. This particular school draws its pupils 



How Shall We Learn to Keep House? 169 

from two distinct social classes. From west of 
State Street, on the one hand, come the daughters 
of Jewish, Polish and Greek immigrants and of 
colored people; from Englewood and Hyde Park 
come the daughters of the well-to-do. Below the 
girls' uniform cooking aprons one sometimes sees 
silk stockings and custom-made pumps, some- 
times darned cotton stockings with dollar shoes 
down at the heel. These girls cooked and served a 
luncheon to six children of the school. The menu 
was: 

Goldenrod Eggs on Toast. 

Corn-bread Cakes. 

Milk. 

Cornstarch Pudding. 

Sugar Cookies. 

One of the two girls who were told to set the 
table was a little Russian Jewess. Her fingers were 
all thumbs and she didn't know what dishes the 
different things required. The other girl was a 
brisk little American, who corrected the other's 
mistakes. 

"The table looks crowded to me," said the Jew- 
ish girl to the American girl. 

"It looks all right to me," the American girl 
answered. 

"No wonder she thinks there is too much on the 
table," the teacher whispered. "Sophie's people 
practically never sit down to a meal. They are 
just on the edge of destitution and eat whenever 
and wherever they can get the food." 



lyo Increasing Home Efficiency 

For Sophie, the simple school lunch established 
a standard of luxury. To establish home standards 
is the most important work the Public School can 
do, and these standards can be most directly and 
most unconsciously established through the study 
of housekeeping. For instance, the girls of this 
school had been asked to cook a meal at home dur- 
ing the spring vacation and bring an account of it 
to the class. A little Greek girl wrote: 

"I made a dinner for five people 

1. French fried potatoes. 

2. Bread. 

3. Baking-powder biscuits. 

4. Cake. 

5. Cocoa. 

6. Custard." 

and then with a diiferent pencil, straggling hastily 
into the center of the page: 



iC 



7. Sirloin Steak." 



"That means," said the teacher, pointing, 
"that she didn't really have the steak. I had 
them read their menus to the class, and when she 
heard that every one else had meat, she wrote that 
in. Her family are too poor to have much meat at 
any time, or sirloin steak ever." 

How long a step is it from surreptitiously writ- 
ing "sirloin steak" into a meatless dinner, to in- 
sisting loudly that sirloin steak or its equivalent 
shall be possible for all dinners .^^ There are inter- 
esting social suggestions in these cooking lessons! 



How Shall We Learn to Keep House? 171 

Besides the standards of food and service, the 
standards of equipment are established in the 
public schools. These girls are not taught to use 
the cheap and laborious coal range, but the expen- 
sive and convenient gas stove. They are educated 
to labor saving; and Miss Snow has her eyes set 
on getting electric equipment into the public 
school kitchens. "We needs must love the highest 
when we see it" — even in cook-stoves, and it ought 
to be worth a good deal to create a demand for the 
best in labor-saving devices as well as in grammar. 
Certainly if we know what we ought to have, we 
have a better chance of getting it than if we don't. 

The syllabus of Domestic Science and Domes- 
tic Art which the Illinois State University has just 
prepared for the high schools that are to carry on 
this grade work of establishing standards contains 
such significant topics as: the fruit industry; the 
cost of fruits; fraudulent and harmful preserva- 
tives; adulteration of confectionery; the sugar 
industry; factors in the cost of milk; inspection of 
dairies and milk wagons; cost of meat and danger 
from stale meat poisoning; food requirements for 
people of different ages and occupations; exercise 
in planning meals for 10, 20, 30 and 40 cents a 
day, with special reference to economy of time, 
labor and fuel; relation of consumer and dealer to 
the pure food laws; house-planning to show conven- 
ience, cost, and efficiency; relation of exercise, 
fresh air, sleep, diet, and cleanliness to health; 
relation of personal hygiene to the public; impor- 
tance of leisure; effect of carelessness and bad 



172 Increasing Home Efficiency 

management at home upon the community; in- 
fluence of the community upon the home; sanitary 
conditions of clothing factories; laws regulating 
child labor and the sweat-shops. 

These are only a part of the things that go into 
the housekeeping courses in the high schools of 
Illinois, — the things that are offered all the girls at 
public expense. How long will it be, one wonders, 
before that Domestic Science camel draws in the 
last tip of his tail; how long before the children who 
have learned what they ought to have in shelter, 
and food, and clothing, will protest because they 
cannot have them.^ 

To balance the undoubted good that the teach- 
ing of this larger housekeeping brings with it, 
there is the shadow of a minor evil. If you train 
all girls for a housekeeping that implies marriage 
as the sole channel through which to practice it, 
are you not dangling the wedding ring too insis- 
tently before their eyes? Are you not giving new 
life to Jane Austen's statement: 

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a 
single man in possession of a good fortune must be 
in want of a wife." 

Do we want to fit all women for matrimony as 
if it were certain, and so make it the duty of all 
parents to see that their daughters are married as 
a preface to their life's business? 

But on the other hand, is it good economics to 
have a large number of women avoid marriage 
because they don't understand the business side 
of it? Or carry on that business badly after they 



How Shall We Learn to Keep House? 173 

have entered marriage or inadvertently dropped 
into it? The absolutely undomesticated woman is 
difficult to fit into the sort of civilization we have 
worked out, for the reason that housekeeping is 
the back-bone of it. 

The solution of the problem seems to be to make 
housekeeping a cultural study and teach it to 
everybody. Why is it not as good a training for 
the mind as mathematics or geography or civil 
government? Not that it need take the place of 
any of these, but that it should be made a setting 
for them all. In the School of Education of the 
University of Chicago they are teaching the ele- 
ments of housekeeping as well as of agriculture 
and the manual arts, to all the students, boys and 
girls alike. 

This course aims to do exactly what Miss 
Snow is trying to do for the girls in the Chicago 
Public Schools, not to make them full-fledged, 
efficient housekeepers, but to give them the prin- 
ciples of Domestic Science. They do go out of 
school and into industry, they enter a trade or 
profession and earn money for themselves; per- 
haps there is a ten-year interval between the 
time they study Domestic Science and the time 
they take up their own skillets in their own matri- 
monially acquired four-rooms-and-a-bath; but no 
girl who has once made an omelette can ever be 
afraid of an egg. She can look any cook-stove 
straight in the eye. She may make mistakes, 
but she is apt to substitute the use of the brain 
for the use of the tear-ducts in emergencies. She 



174 Increasing Home Efficiency 

has a different attitude of mind toward the whole 
problem of housekeeping, views marriage with 
more confidence and is less likely to fail in her 
share of it through ignorance of the duties involved. 
She may forget the things she learned; but she re- 
tains the principles, the knowledge of the point 
of attack. 

And with this underpinning scientifically im- 
parted to all children between the ages of eleven 
and fourteen, the specific training that every one 
needs who practices housekeeping will not be so 
hard to acquire. There are a good many ways and 
places where It may be had. 

At Columbia University we found housekeepers 
studying new methods of laundry work so that 
their clothes could be perfectly washed; studying 
scientific house-planning and dietetics and decora- 
tion. One woman was there learning to do per- 
sonally what she expects her servants to do as a 
first aid In solving the servant problem. 

"I see now how difficult It Is to make rolls," 
she said, "and I think I know why Mary makes 
them so badly. I know too just hov/ a room ought 
to be cleaned and what I have a right to require of 
my housemaids." 

Of course, only a small proportion of house- 
keepers can study In a school. Instruction must 
be taken to them by either correspondence schools 
or traveling demonstration teachers. Mr. Hatch, 
head of the extension work of the Agricultural 
Department of the University of Wisconsin, has 
planned a car, fitted as a model house, to be 



How Shall We Learn to Keep House? 175 

dropped at town after town through the State, 
with instructors to teach the women who gather 
around it. There is no place where this extension 
work is more needed or where it receives heartier 
welcome than in the isolated homes in the country. 
Judging from the seventy-five thousand women 
who were reached by the demonstration cars in 
California, and the twenty thousand reached in 
Oklahoma last year, this sort of a traveling school 
of housekeeping should be effective. The house- 
keeping departments of the Farmers' Institutes 
are crowded, and one of the housekeeping cor- 
respondence schools has reached ten thousand 
women. Professor Martha Van Rensselaer, in 
charge of the Department of Home Economics in 
the New York State College of Agriculture, is con- 
ducting a most successful campaign for modern 
home-making among the farmers' wives of her 
State. In many States of the Union and in the 
provinces of Canada this extension work is under 
way. It might be better if we could adopt the 
method introduced by the late Dr. Seaman A. 
Knapp Into the Department of Agriculture, which 
sends teachers straight to the farms to teach boys 
and girls and parents how to handle their home 
and agricultural problems under normal conditions. 
But these demonstratiqn cars and correspondence 
courses are a good beginning. 

It may seem strange that we have put the 
graded schools ahead of the secondary schools and 
colleges, which have such excellent courses in home 
economics, in this consideration of the places where 



176 Increasing Home Efficiency 

one may learn to keep house. The reason is that 
these higher schools are not primarily training 
housekeepers. Teachers' College, Simmons Col- 
lege, the Universities of Wisconsin and Illinois, 
teach housekeeping primarily as a profession, 
first for teachers of domestic science, but beyond 
that for twenty other professions. Professor 
Abby L. Marlatt, head of the Department of 
Home Economics in the University of Wisconsin, 
has given us the following list of professions, with 
the demand for workers in each of them and the 
pay the workers may expect. 

Public lecturers and demonstrators for clubs; 
commercial demonstrators for gas and food and 
utensil companies; newspaper writers for special 
women's columns; dietitians in sanitaria, hospitals, 
clubs and dormitories; managers of cafeterias, 
tea-rooms, and school lunch-rooms; sanitary in- 
spectors; tenement-house supervisors, directors, 
and rent-collectors; managers of bakeries; writers 
of recipe books for food manufacturing companies; 
experts on the utilization of food wasted in fac- 
tories; managers of laundries; superintendents of 
household aid societies; professional marketers, 
house-cleaners, etc.; candy, preserve, and pickle- 
makers; modistes and dressmakers; managers of 
day nurseries; managers of factories and in- 
stitutions; superintendents of nurses; and social 
workers. 

A list of the graduates of the Department of 
Household Science of the University of Illinois 
from 1903 to 1910 shows that less than 16 per 



How Shall We Learn to Keep House? 177 

cent are married, less than 25 per cent are at 
home; all the rest are teachers or professional 
workers. On the surface it looks as though the 
college courses in housekeeping were merely for 
the training of teachers, but when one studies the 
various catalogues and alumnae reports one finds 
that a very large proportion of the domestic 
science teachers do marry later and begin prac- 
ticing their professions on their own families, 
while the students they have trained go on train- 
ing others in turn. 

One of these ex-domestic science teachers has 
given us her story. She had four years of special 
training, followed by five years of teaching, and 
now her seven-room servantless house and her 
two small daughters are no weight on her spirits. 
Food comes and goes on her table without anxi- 
ety, a vegetable garden seems automatically to 
produce green things, and it is as though the 
house cleaned itself. The work of housekeeping 
is well subordinated to the business of living. It 
is a desirable condition, based on knowledge of 
housekeeping — ordered knowledge gained from 
experts in school, and in startling contrast to the 
wisdom of "mother," who was equipped for the 
business of teaching with nothing better than 
tradition, devotion to her home, humility as to 
what she had a right to demand in the way of 
mechanical assistance or financial compensation, 
and especially with a firm and disastrous convic- 
tion that her own experience, however limited, 
was an infallible guide. There is no denying that, 



178 Increasing Home Efficiency 

under these circumstances, "mother" did not 
produce a valuable science of housekeeping. But 
how could she, since ability to keep house is no 
part of the inherited maternal instinct, of marital 
affection, respectable conduct, a cultivated mind, 
moral grandeur, or any other quality supposed to 
be inherent in the human female ? A knowledge of 
housekeeping is not a matter of sex, but of science; 
and, since it is something that we all ought to 
know, men and women alike, isn't the public 
school, which we are all forced to attend, the 
proper place to learn it? We are all forced to 
learn the measurements of land and the principles 
of surveying, though few indeed of us ever own a 
foot of our own land. We must study longitude 
and time, though we are content to set our own 
watches by the factory whistle, not by the stars. 
Why should we not all learn the principles of 
housekeeping, on which we depend three hundred 
and sixty-five days in the year.^ Ought they not 
to be a part of our race knowledge? 

And, in addition to this general knowledge for 
us all, should we not insist on a special trade 
training for all who are actually engaged in house- 
keeping? If we are able to work out a system of 
public education that reaches all the children, 
surely we can stretch it to include that fraction of 
the grown-ups who are housekeepers. For we do 
need the two kinds of education — the general 
principles for us all, and the special instruction for 
those who practice the profession. 

"I think there is danger of carrying this rage 



How Shall We Learn to Keep House? 179 

for domestic science too far," cried the dean of a 
woman's college. *'We let it get in the way of 
culture." 

On the contrary! The whole development of 
domestic science is to the one end that housekeep- 
ing may get out of the way of culture. We study 
it in order to prevent the work of housekeeping, 
which, however we may hate to admit it, is the 
basis of our civilization, from blighting the things 
that are the flower of our civilization. We prefer 
the attitude of Virginia's State Superintendent of 
Public Instruction, Mr. Joseph D. Eggleston. 
"No man believes in cultural education more than 
I do," he writes, "or believes more in the vital 
necessity of continuing this cultural education in 
order to preserve that fine spirit and vision with- 
out which we perish. But I take no stock whatever 
in that false culture which thinks it degrading to 
work with the hands. It is the doing of everyday y 
work in a shiftless manner that is degrading and 
destructive of culture." 



CHAPTER X 
Training the Consumer 

FROM one of the universities which offers 
special courses in Domestic Art and House- 
hold Science, we got a pamphlet on The 
Principles of Jelly Making. It is an admirable 
pamphlet. It covers the subject thoroughly, and 
lays out a straight road to the production from a 
given amount of fruit of the most jelly of the best 
quality at the lowest cost. Besides definite direc- 
tions for the making of particular jellies, it gives a 
resume of the principles that underlie all jelly mak- 
ing, so that one who reads is richer in general cul- 
ture as well as specific information. It is a valuable 
pamphlet in its place, but its most serviceable place 
is not in the training of the housekeeper. To be of 
most benefit to her, it would be primarily a pam- 
phlet on the Principles of Jelly Eating. For the 
modern housekeeper is in the throes of metamor- 
phosis from producer to consumer, and the most im- 
portant function of real education is to fit her not 
for the state she is leaving, but for the state she is 
entering into. To make jelly is ceasing to be an 
important part of housekeeping — to eat jelly is, 
let us hope, the unending privilege of us all. 

Now, it has been taken for granted through the 
i8o 



Training the Consumer 18 1 

generations that, since we all do consume things 
from the moment we are born until we die, con- 
sumption must be instinctive, no more needing to 
be taught than breathing. We see, dimly, that 
modern housekeeping has let go of production and 
concentrated on consumption, but we are, most of 
us, a little loath to admit that an education in 
housekeeping must be almost entirely an educa- 
tion in consumption. This was not true in the 
past, it may not be true in the coming ages, but 
in the present and the immediate future it is not 
to be questioned; for as Mrs. Ellen H. Richards 
said, "home economics must stand for the ideal 
home life of today unhampered by the traditions 
of the past." 

Time was when the woman who kept house was 
expected to be the high priestess of that dire 
goddess How-to-Save-Money, but her metamor- 
phosis from producer to consumer has shifted her 
worship to the new deity How-to-Spend. From 
an all-round producer the American woman has 
become the greatest consumer in the world. Of 
the ten billion dollars spent annually in the United 
States for home maintenance, food, shelter and 
clothing, fully ninety per cent is spent by women. 
Isn't the science of consumption, then, worthy of 
special emphasis in the training for home effi- 
ciency.^ 

Not many schools of Home Economics have 
grasped the fact that they should be per se trainers 
of consumers. They still tend to over-emphasize 
home production; but the best of them are very 



1 82 Increasing Home Efficiency 

generally swinging toward the first and most im- 
portant work of training the consumer — they are 
beginning to establish standards. 

"I am conscious of a standard," writes a pupil 
of a correspondence school from southern Illinois. 
"I see it in the way I manage my household, in 
my expenditure, my work. I think a change in' 
my standards is now going on under the influence 
of my household studies. The change will, I sus- 
pect, consist largely in a shifting of emphasis, in 
delivering me from certain traditional ideas." 

The standard of this lady was the inherited 
housekeeping standard, the standard which our 
ancestors established through the long ages when 
they were building up the home as a factory. 

Take the matter of food. It is undoubtedly for 
the advantage of the community that every in- 
dividual stomach should have enough and not too 
much inside it. The old standard was to distend 
its walls by mere bulk; the new school-set standard 
is to furnish it some 2,000 to 3,000 food units 
daily. The schools have worked out this stand- 
ard of consumption through the study of protein 
and starches and fats; of calories and muscle 
builders and heat producers, till they have found 
the amount and kind of fuel the human machine 
needs for the various kinds of work it must do. 
To build these standards is a question of labora- 
tories and applied mathematics not within the com- 
mand of any middle-class home. If all of us are to 
have the benefit of them, they must be brought 
to us by the universities and the public school 



Training the Consumer 183 

We met a Pratt Institute graduate on the 
Chicago train and led her gently to tell us how 
much of her domestic science she found useful in 
her housekeeping. 

"Well," she confessed, "when the baby is 
teething and the cook has left and there is com- 
pany to dinner, I don't think much about calories 
or a balanced ration, but somehow IVe got the 
theory so well digested that I put the right things 
together without thinking about it." 

Her food standard has become a part of her 
unconscious mental furniture, like the gauge by 
which we measure the length of our steps and the 
focus of our eyes. 

We looked over some papers on Housing written 
by pupils of the American School of Home Eco- 
nomics. Says one of the students who lives in the 
country: "In the matter of house sanitation, the 
important point is to know exactly what you have 
to deal with. There is no use in taking country 
plumbing for granted. You have got to get away 
not only from the traditional ideas of the man who 
built the house, but from your own old ideas as 
well." 

These old ideas from which she is being freed 
by new school-set standards taught that a coun- 
try house did not need an indoor bathroom, that 
the parlor was a jewel-casket to be opened only 
on rare occasions, that the children should be 
"bunched" several In a room, that running water 
on the second floor was a luxury, that the sanitary 
garbage disposal was optional with the individual. 



184 Increasing Home Efficiency 

Under the influence of her new standard she has 
found out where every one of the pipes in her 
house are located, what they are for and how 
they attend to their job. She has worked out for 
herself a system of out-of-the-house drainage, a 
new water system, and a method of scientific 
ventilation. As a consumer of housing, she has 
put her training into practice. 

Now, the basis of all these standards must be 
the ability to recognize quality when we see it. 
This is so important and so difficult that the gov- 
ernment tries to make it unnecessary. To estab- 
lish standards — minimum standards to be sure — 
has come to be the work of sanitary inspectors, 
tenement-house imspectors, clean milk commis- 
sions, pure food and drug experts, departments of 
street cleaning, and a hundred more. Theoreti- 
cally, it would be well for the government to es- 
tablish standards for the consumption of all things 
and so save the schools from the onerous duty of 
inculcating them, and the pupils from the travail 
of assimilation. But how shall a government that 
can reasonably say: "Potatoes below a certain 
grade shall not be used for human food," regulate 
the number of up-to-grade potatoes a man shall 
eat.^ How shall a government that can and does 
keep printed matter below a certain grade out of 
the mails, say to the voracious consumer of stori- 
ettes: "Thus far and no further!".-^ 

Besides, an efficient government without effi- 
cient citizens is not a democracy; we don't want 
to revert to a benevolent autocracy or even an 



Training the Consumer 185 

apron-string bureaucracy. The setting and main- 
tenance of standards is a two-handed business, — 
the establishment of standards by the government 
and the testing and use of these standards by an 
enHghtened citizenship. And in matters where 
the government has not yet established standards 
of quality, the initiative must come from the con- 
sumer. 

Consider the consumption of textiles, — a job we 
have been at ever since we progressed beyond the 
wearing of raw skins. But the quality of textiles 
is still one of the unguarded frontiers of knowledge. 
In fact, the general knowledge of quality in textiles 
is decreasing, for though the specialists have grown 
wiser, the consumers who used to know a good deal 
about cloth they themselves spun and wove, 
have grown more ignorant. Have we not, all of 
us, seen our mothers place a wet finger under the 
table-cloths they were buying to see if they were 
pure linen.'' That is a perfectly good test with 
hand-spun linen, but it is a dull manufacturer who 
can't circumvent a wet finger. We need both the 
training of the schools and the government guar- 
antee to buy cloth wisely. 

The University of Wisconsin is giving a course 
for consumers of textiles at the same time that 
members of its faculty are working to get through 
a law on the standardization of cloth. The stu- 
dents study wool from sheep to broadcloth; silk, 
from worm to ribbon, and are required to do one 
piece of weaving on the hand loom, not for manual 
skill, but to make them understand the tests of 



1 86 Increasing Home EflBciency 

quality. They are not expected to become weavers 
but consumers of clothes. With this same end in 
view they are taught the processes of dyeing and 
the durability of colors, and they study especially 
the adulteration of fabrics. We were shown card 
after card of cloth sold for all wool which when 
tested by the students proved to be practically all 
cotton. 

But it is no longer enough that cloth should be 
all wool and a yard wide — that means little. These 
consumers must learn that even pure wool when 
it is short and stiff or soft and weak is a poor pur- 
chase; that there are qualities of cloth in which the 
warp and weft are so uneven in weight that the 
heavy threads pull the light ones and the cloth 
wears itself out; that there are weaves in which 
certain threads are so exposed that they break 
and leave a rough surface. All tests of "pure 
wool" cloth! 

But even this is only a small part of the study of 
woolen fabrics, only a preliminary to establishing 
the standards of quality and price for the benefit 
of the consumer. Into these standards enter con- 
ditions of cloth production in the factory, wages 
paid operatives, taxes paid the government, 
"Schedule K," freight rates, and the costs of sell- 
ing the finished product. This training In textiles 
is not limited to general principles. It applies 
itself to such definite things as blue serge and black 
broadcloth, and other standard products. These 
classes of consumers have determined that under 
existing conditions of wool production, price of 



Training the Consumer 187 

labor and tariff, the lowest cost for blue serge, 
fifty-four inches wide and of efficient quality, is a 
dollar and a half a yard, and that the lowest cost of 
a similar quality of black broadcloth is nearly 
three dollars. Will not the trained consumer who 
has thoroughly assimilated these facts realize that 
when either blue serge or black broadcloth is 
offered for a less price, they are not all wool, or 
wool of poor quality, or damaged, or "mill ends" 
or remnants? Of course they recognize that both 
good and inferior cloths have their legitimate uses 
if the consumer is neither deceived as to their 
quality nor overcharged. There is no reason why 
the law should prohibit their manufacture as it 
may well prohibit the manufacture of adulterated 
foods and drugs. All the consumer needs is to be 
protected by an honest label. How could the 
world get along without "shoddy" for instance, a 
cloth made from odds and ends of wool fibre, 
usually fibre that has been used before, when the 
present production of new wool is not nearly equal 
to the demand? 

But the student has got to be taught that even 
these standards of quality are not absolute things. 
The perfect buttonhole may be produced at such 
a cost of time and labor that it is for the general 
advantage to use the commonplace hook and eye. 
It is not a question whether we can individually 
afford to pay in money for hand-made lingerie, but 
whether the community can afford the expenditure 
of so much eyesight and time and thought to make 
what is perhaps a superior product, but for which 



1 88 Increasing Home Efficiency 

there is an approximate substitute; for are not 
things expensive to the community even when we 
make them ourselves? 

Besides knowing what it is for the advantage of 
the community and being able to recognize quality 
when one sees it, it is the work of the consumer to 
see that what the community needs is produced. 
Can one eat eggs, however wholesome, in a land 
where no hens are? We listened to one domestic 
science teacher who seemed to set us right between 
the covers of Mutual Friend, where Dickens tells 
how "Mrs. John Rokesmith who had never been 
wont to do too much as Miss Bella Wilfer was 
under the constant necessity of referring for advice 
and support to a sage volume entitled *The Com- 
plete British Family Housewife.' But there was a 
coolness on the part of the British Housewife that 
Mrs. J. R. found highly exasperating. She would 
say *take a salamander,' or casually issue the order 
*throw in a handful of — something entirely un- 
attainable. In these, the Housewife's glaring 
moments of unreason, Bella would shut her up 
and knock her on the table, apostrophizing her 
with the compliment, 'Oh, you are a stupid old 
Donkey! Where am I to get it, do you think?'" 

A good many instructors — far be it from us to 
call them what "Bella" did — entirely ignore the 
difficulties of getting the "salamander"! That is 
one place where Teachers' College in New York 
City is strong — it teaches the prospective consumer 
how to get the "salamander." 

Now we know that it is to the advantage of 



Training the Consumer 189 

society that we should all have clean clothes and 
house linen, and we are fairly able to recognize 
cleanliness when we see it. But to produce this 
cleanliness under modern conditions is quite an- 
other matter. We have, thank Heaven, passed, 
mentally at least, beyond the stage of mother-at- 
the-washtub. We are passing rapidly beyond the 
stage of anybody at the washtub anywhere, and 
at Teachers' College, the consumers of clean 
clothes, prospective and actual, are being taught 
how under actual conditions clean clothes can be 
produced. 

"How people can accept clothes blued with the 
old liquid indigo I don't seel" exclaimed an in- 
structor at the college. 

"Why not?" we inquired, all blueing being more 
or less alike to us. 

"Why not.^ Don't you know that it makes 
rust spots?" 

And then and there she took us Into a class that 
was making a special study of blueings and we 
learned how much waste there was in block and 
ball blueings and that the proper thing to use was 
a specially prepared analine dye of the proper 
shade. We were shown how our Intelligent demand 
for clean clothes could be satisfied, how the thing 
we wanted could be produced. As part of this 
education, the girls at Teachers' College also test 
out washing machines and mangles. Irons, and 
soaps, bought In the open market, with reference 
to their effect on the things washed, their cost to 
buy and operate, and the skill, time and strength 



I go Increasing Home Efficiency 

their use Involves. The college does not, however, 
lay down any fiat on blueing, nor on washing ma- 
chines, nor on any other laundry appliance; for 
may not far better things be Invented In the fu- 
ture? It teaches the points In the production of 
clean clothes as it might teach the points In judging 
fox terriers, — not whether any specific flat Iron or 
small dog is good or bad. 

Inextricably mixed up with learning how to get 
produced the things one wants Is learning how to 
secure them after they are produced. The con- 
sumer must be trained to remove the obstacles 
between himself and the thing he needs. These 
obstacles are usually matters of cost — cost and its 
contributing causes, transportation, the exploita- 
tion of public utilities, the smothering of useful 
patents and the arbitrary limiting of useful manu- 
facture. From all over the country come letters 
full of the same things that are in the contributors' 
columns of the papers and magazines. "Eggs 
cost 60 cents a dozen, so we use rice instead." 
"Electric current for heating Is so expensive that 
we still burn coal." "I would like to send Harold 
to college but it costs so much that I cannot afford 
to." "Do not use butter in making pastry, for 
though the flavor Is better, the cost Is very much 
more." 

The consumer and those who advise him take 
prices as final things, as representing the true cost 
plus a fair profit, whereas In reality — 

Now the trained consumer knows that there is 
no fuel like electricity, so clean, so reliable, so 



Training the Consumer 191 

easily controlled, but the better trained she is, the 
more certainly she knows that she is as much cut 
off from using it as though it were ambergris. 
Why? Because it varies in price from 10 to 19 
cents a kilowatt hour. We have just called up the 
contract department of the Commonwealth Edison 
Company of Chicago, and found that the net rate 
for family use is 10 cents, exactly the same as in 
New York City. But the people of the region 
have taxed themselves to build a drainage canal, a 
property now belonging to the people, which has 
developed 125,000 horse power, about 100,000 
horse power of which is available. This, in the 
form of electric current at the very lowest estimate, 
is worth about $2,000,000 a year. Some experts 
reckon it to be worth ten times that. A small 
thing but their own, and what could it not do if 
turned into the kitchens of Chicago at cost.^ Does 
that 10 cents a kilowatt hour rate have to stand? 
Is it wise to teach the consumers that it is a heaven- 
fixed obstacle to good housekeeping? They broke 
down the $1.00 per 1,000 feet gas limit in New 
York City, the carfare rate in Cleveland, and the 
freight rate limits in Wisconsin. 

We were talking with a woman from Sun Prairie, 
a small Wisconsin town in the midst of a dairy 
district. 

"Oh yes, I cook with electricity," she said. 
"It does cost a good deal now, because you see 
the plant is just new and we haven't paid for it 
yet." 

"Paid for it?" 



192 Increasing Home Eflficiency 

She looked at us for a moment in uncomprehend- 
ing surprise, then smiled her amusement. 

"Oh, it belongs to the town, you know. We pay 
a good price for the current now, almost as much 
as they do in a city; but as soon as we have paid 
for our plant, we shall get it at cost and then it'll 
be the cheapest thing we could use." 

This of course is on the basis of a municipally 
owned plant — a small one that is supposed to be 
more costly to run than a larger one. 

The University of Illinois, in a pamphlet 
written by Mrs. E. Davenport, has worked out 
the cost of equipping a single country house — one 
that can be sufficiently lit by thirty tungsten 
burners — with an electric plant of its own. The 
cost of buying and installing this plant is ap- 
proximately ^600, the cost of maintenance from 
$S to ^10 a year, and the cost of the electricity 
so produced is 5 cents a kilowatt hour. This is on 
a scale so small that it is theoretically very ex- 
pensive to run! Now of course Mrs. Davenport's 
plan involves electricity at a low voltage to be 
used for lighting only; but the country consumer 
who has refused to consider the kerosene lamp as 
final may well refuse to limit herself by the coal 
range either. Aren't the problems of electric 
light and electric heat Siamese twins ^ 

Certainly it is part of the consumer's job to 
perform an economic steeple-chase over the fences 
and the ditches and hedges that are between her 
and the things that it is for the advantage of the 
community that she should have, and it should be 



Training the Consumer 193 

part of her education to practice her in economic 
hurdle jumping. 

We have been talking with Miss Snow, head of 
Domestic Science in the Chicago Public Schools. 

"If this instruction in housekeeping/' said she, 
"were nothing but teaching the children to cook 
and clean and wash and do all the other things 
that are done in the home, I shouldn't be very 
much interested in it. As I see it, Domestic 
Science is a training in relations. It takes up gov- 
ernment, and politics, and business, and health, and 
capital, and labor and the social setting of them 
all. It is really training the consumer to /zW." 

And to live is to consume! 

In the Public Schools, where the courses are 
comparatively elementary, the relations between 
life and the specific studies are not difficult to 
establish, but when the general principles cover 
themselves with a mass of detail as they do in the 
more elaborate courses of the universities, it 
takes a conscious binding together of the threads 
to bring them into relation in the students' minds. 
This is not very often done for the reason that few 
members of the faculties understand it themselves. 

"What is the object of all this Home Economics 
work.^" we asked the head of a department in a 
great State University. "You're supported by 
the State funds, what are you giving back to the 
people in return.^" 

She looked a little vague, and then said, bright- 
ening: 

"We've five thousand students." 



194 Increasing Home Efficiency 

"I suppose you're taking such courses as this 
one in sewing, on through the commercial produc- 
tion of clothes, through factory legislation, and 
wages and hours?" 

"Oh, we couldn't go into that!" she cried. 

The detailed study in that University was good, 
but a course in textiles naturally gets itself a long 
way from the piece of cloth boiling in caustic 
potash to see if it is all wool or not, and a cooking 
course a long way from how to make muffins, and 
a sewing course from how to make buttonholes, 
and all the other courses in a Home Economic 
department sprangle away from the ostensible 
starting points. It takes not only a big under- 
lying idea, but a forceful personality to do the 
new work of correlating these things, and feeding 
them predigested to the consumer in training. 
Both the idea and the personalities they have at 
the University of Wisconsin. As Mr. Hatch, head 
of the Extension Work of the Agricultural College 
told us: "You eastern people who are used to 
endowed institutions may not understand it, but 
the object of this university that the people have 
made, is to be serviceable to the people." 

And Professor Abby L. Marlatt, head of the 
Department of Home Economics, has had the 
force to draw all these diverse activities into a 
course in what she has called "Humanics," planned 
to link the theories of the class-room to the reali- 
ties of life. We heard one lecture in this course. 
Its subject was "The Child in Industry — Its Effect 
upon State Laws and Necessary Legislation." 



Training the Consumer 195 

It was a talk backed by government documents 
and state investigations, by the reports of chari- 
table societies, tariff schedules and the rate- 
regulation of railroads, and not a conclusion did it 
draw! Quite unemotionally it showed that there 
is child labor in quantity, and how much and 
where, according to the census; showed the cost 
of this in health and intelligence, quoting from 
government investigations in the South; on the 
death rate, quoting from the report of the Associa- 
tion for the Prevention of Infant Mortality; 
showed that it is absolute necessity that forces 
children to go to work, quoting from the Mas- 
sachusetts report on why children go to work; 
showed the wages of fathers and mothers in the 
woolen mills of Lawrence before the last strike, 
and correlated these with the claims that the high 
tariff on wool is to protect the standard of wages 
of the American working-man; and with the num- 
ber of children actually working in these same 
mills because their parents cannot support them; 
and all these things with the price of woolen cloth 
and the profit on it, — Miss Marlatt didn't have 
to draw conclusions. The brain of a twenty-year- 
old college student after it has been tabulating 
chemical and physical experiments in three 
columns, — first, the process, as laid down in the 
book; second, the result, as observed by the eye; 
third, the inference as made by the brain, — draws 
conclusions from such a lecture as this of Miss Mar- 
latt quite automatically. 

Miss Marlatt's students will be among the very 



196 Increasing Home Efficiency 

few of us who have been trained in the principles 
of consumption beyond the narrow individual 
principle established by our individual digestions 
or complexions, our social aspirations or our 
mental appetites. Housekeeping, even the larger 
housekeeping which is not production, is but a 
small part of this science of consumption which 
can operate quite as directly upon a memorial 
statue at Washington as upon a can of beans — 
consumption is our one universal function, and 
through it we have power and happiness and 
progress, or retrogression and spiritual and bodily 
death. Some of us already know what we indi- 
vidually want to consume and how to get it, but 
it takes an educated social vision to see the needs 
of the whole race and how to satisfy them. Is 
there any bigger work for the universities, the 
colleges and the public schools than to train con- 
sumers to this end? 



CHAPTER XI 

The Cost of Children 

ANEW JERSEY farmer has made a careful 
estimate of the cost of raising potatoes. 
^ He has considered climate and fertilizer, 
cost of land and cost of labor, probabilities of 
marketing and dangers of waste on the way, 
and the toll to the industrious insect, and has 
concluded that every bushel of potatoes costs 
him seventy-five cents. Potatoes are a valuable 
crop. An Iowa dairyman has figured that each 
cow costs twelve and a half cents a day above 
the cost of marketing her milk. Milk is a valuable 
crop. The cost of production has been standard- 
ized for practically every commodity. But no- 
body has worked out the cost of children, though 
they are the most valuable crop of all. 

Children, like every other product, cost three 
kinds of things: brains, money, and muscle. The 
money cost is the only one of these three that is at 
all easy to estimate; obviously there is a minimum 
below which the most competent mother, let her 
sew and brew and bake ever so incessantly, cannot 
rear a child in health. But just what the very 
minimum, bargain-counter cost of children is no 
one seems to have determined, although from 

197 



igS Increasing Home Efficiency 

every side comes the cry that people do not have 
children because they cost so much. 

Now, it will not do to put the subject aside with 
a Podsnappian wave of the arm; for when the 
irresistible tendency to increase the cost of living 
meets the immovable conviction that children are 
not only the greatest good to the individual but 
the most valuable gift to the State, something is 
bound to happen. 

Up in Mahanoy City, a town in the anthracite 
fields, where the coal-breakers stand like giant 
toboggan slides against the sky, and the culm piles 
are hand-made mountains beside the real hills — 
wonderful places for the adventurous young — we 
found very few children of the sliding-down-hill 
age, and remarked their absence to the driver. 

"Oh, the Hunks and Polacks, they ain't got 
many children," said he, stolidly. "Three out of 
every five of 'em dies. But they don't lose much," 
he reassured us, "they mostly insure 'em for forty 
dollars. They say a child costs about eight dollars 
a year till it's five years old, and then it can sort 
'of scratch 'round for itself. When it's ten, it can 
go to work and help the family. So they insure 
'em for forty dollars, and if they dies, they get 
their money back, and if they lives, they've got 
their kids. They don't stand to lose much either 
way," and he tapped his whip reflectively on the 
dash-board. 

Eight dollars a year for five years ! 

Says Rowntree in his study of York, England: 
*' Every (unskilled) laborer who has as many as 



The Cost of Children 199 

three children must pass through a time — probably 
lasting about ten years — when he and his family 
will be underfed. ... If he has but two children, 
these conditions will be better to the extent of two 
shillings tenpence (a week); If he has but one, they 
will be better to the extent of five shillings ha' 
penny." 

According to this. It takes a minimum of two 
shillings tenpence a week to keep a child In York, 
or a little less than thirty-seven dollars a year. 
Of course these coal-miners' and unskilled laborers' 
children are distinctly "cheap" children. They 
come from families way below the efficiency line, 
and the only value of their budgets Is to Indicate 
the lowest limit of subsistence for a child — the 
limit below which automatic elimination takes 
place. No one would seriously hold that It Is for 
the advantage of society to rear children In such 
shallow economic soil. Taking so much for 
granted, what do children cost In homes that have 
the money basis at least for social efficiency.^ 

In the matter of children, It Is not safe to 
begin at the beginning, for doctors' bills on the 
one hand and generous friends on the other make 
the first cost of babies excessively difficult to 
determine. 

"Our little daughter cost us twenty dollars the 
first year — ten for the doctor, ten for clothes — and 
I wish you could see what a beauty she Is!" This 
from a Nebraska farm. 

"It cost precisely six hundred and sixty-seven 
dollars to provide my baby's outfit — to get him ^ 



200 Increasing Home Efficiency 

here, to furnish him with crib, go-cart, high chair, 
and clothes, and to feed and care for him after he 
came." This from the wife of a New England 
business man. 

Between these two range other first-year middle- 
class budgets, with the doctor's bill and the nurse's 
salary well in the foreground. The possibility of 
the first year's cost stretching suddenly into the 
hundreds is a grave thing to face. Suppose you 
are living on twelve hundred a year, how many 
hundreds could you save In the year before the 
child comes .^ The same erratic doctors' bills In- 
troduce a wide margin of variation into the dan- 
gerous second summer. For these reasons It is 
convenient to begin the study of the cost of chil- 
dren at a period between three and five, when the 
irregular expenses of babyhood are over, and those 
of compulsory schooling have not commenced. 
The tendency even of the rich Is to dress children 
of this age simply, and the cost of food Is kept 
pretty well within limits by the rigid requirements 
of health. It is the period when the cost of the 
child is affected more by the Internal eflftclency 
of the home and the capabilities of the parents, 
and less by outside influences, than at any other. 
What, then, is the yearly cost of children between 
three and five.^ 

Mrs. Ardell, of Wisconsin, Is a capable woman 
and a good manager. She stretches her husband's 
twelve hundred a year over about as many things 
as twelve hundred dollars can be made to cover. 
She seems to get a lot of joy out of life, and doesn't 



The Cost of Children 201 

pay heavily for it In doctor's bills. She lives in a 
town with a soon-to-be-reallzed ambition to be a 
city, and has a tiny house and a large yard, where 
the four-year-old Ardell can disport himself in un- 
watched safety. Naturally she keeps no nurse- 
maid nor other servant — one can't on twelve hun- 
dred. 

Sixty-seven dollars and twenty cents a year 
Master Ardell costs his parents in money; $43.80 
for food, $10 for clothes, $10 for doctor's bills, 
$3.40 for Incidentals. According to his mother's 
schedule, he gets no store-bought toys; he does not 
go to kindergarten; Instead, he spends most of his 
waking hours out of doors while his mother keeps 
her attention tied to his little romper strings, dur- 
ing the six days at least while her husband Is In 
his office. She can rest from the cook-stove and 
broom by taking care of the baby. Professor 
Simon Patten, of the University of Pennsylvania, 
seems to have had her in mind when he said: 

"Whatever narrows the environment of individ- 
uals, or limits their activities, stops their growth 
and stops social progress." 

It Is perhaps fortunate for the community that 
Mrs. Ardell was fairly well educated and well read 
before the limiting influence of her small son fell 
upon her. 

One wonders just how Inevitable It Is that the 
world should close in for the parents as it opens 
out for the child. Take the Wards, who live in a 
Pennsylvania town of about the same size as the 
Ardells, and who have the same Income — twelve 



202 Increasing Home Efficiency 

hundred a year. They, too, have a four-year-old 
son, but he costs them $95.17 a year — $28.97 more 
than the Ardells pay for theirs. The following is 
his list of expenses: 

Clothes: 

Shoes (3 pairs at $2.00) $6.00 

Suits (3 at $1.75) 5.25 

Overcoat 4.00 

Hat 1. 00 

Stockings (8 pairs at \^}4. cts.) .... i.oo 

Union suits (2 at 50 cts.) i.oo 

Body waist .25 $18.50 

Food (estimated) 45-67 

Help (a woman to sit with him one night a 
week while his parents go to their reading 

circle) 13.00 

Insurance (to provide for his education) 18.00 

$95.17 

No doctor's bill stood against Mrs. Ward's son 
in 1911. 

The extra money spent on this youngster is to 
provide for his education and to make it possible 
for his parents to promote their present efficiency. 
The Wards have set their faces against stagnation. 
Mr. Ward writes of concerts and lectures they 
attend, of university extension schemes and co- 
operative buying experiments in which they are 
interested, and Mrs. Ward "keeps up her music.'^ 



The Cost of Children 203 

For these advantages they sacrifice something 
from their clothes and something from their sav- 
ings, on the principle, as Mr. Ward states it, that 
"to save as an end in itself is vicious; the father 
and mother must be free to enter into the Larger 
Life." 

From the standpoint of society as well as that 
of the children themselves, it seems important 
that they should take as little as possible from the 
present efficiency of their parents. Unless they 
more than make up to society for what they sup- 
press in their parents, are they not a losing proposi- 
tion .f* And is it right to place this heavy responsi- 
bility upon them.'* 

Neither the Ardells nor the Wards celebrated 
the advent of their children by keying up their 
standard of living; they continued in the houses 
they occupied before the children were born, and 
generally went their old ways. When even a 
slightly improved standard is adopted, the cost of 
children goes up with a jump. Take the case of 
Mr. Merton, a New England salaried man, with 
an income of $1,800. He has two children, one 
ten, the other four years old, and with their coming 
he raised the entire level of his housekeeping. 

"In addition to their direct expenditures," he 
writes, "about one hundred dollars should be 
reckoned as additional cost of rent, for if we had 
not had children, we should have lived in a smaller 
house or else have rented enough rooms in our pres- 
ent one to bring the annual cost down correspond- 
ingly. For the same reason the children should be 



204 Increasing Home Efficiency 

accounted as adding to the annual cost of fuel — 
perhaps $40. I think $20 would be below, rather 
than above, the amount chargeable to their ac- 
count annually for added expense of washing and 
cleaning, replacement of bedding and table linen, 
and wear and tear of furniture." 

Of this ^160, ^54 is somewhat arbitrarily charged 
to the account of the four-year-old daughter, mak- 
ing her personal costs as follows: 

Food ^35.00 

Shelter, fuel, wear and tear 54.00 

Clothes, etc 18.70 

Doctor 4.00 

Attendance (woman occasionally at night) 5.00 

Toys 6.00 

Sundries 3.00 



$125.70 



The cost of children not only goes up with a 
jump with each modification of the standard of 
living, but the jump speeds up at each level. A 
larger house means a fuller life for the mother, and 
a fuller life for the mother generally means a nurse- 
maid. Or, again, if a kindergarten is not available, 
or the parents prefer to have the child begin its 
education at home, the dancing teacher is likely 
to be added to the nurse-maid, and sometimes the 
trained kindergartner will supersede the unskilled 
attendant. This progression appears in the fol- 
lowing group of budgets: 



The Cost of Children 205 

I. Pennsylvania Family, Annual Income $3,500. Girl 

four years old. 

Food, etc feo.15 

Clothes, etc 24.25 

$114.40 

II. Maine Family, Annual Income $4,500. Boy four 

years old. 

Food $104.00 

Clothes 60.00 

Books, toys, etc 30.00 

Nurse-maid 156.00 

Dancing lessons 10.00 

$360.00 

III. New York Family. Annual Income $6,000. 

Boy four years old 
Food : 

Milk (certified) $74.40 

Fruit 21.60 

Eggs 9.00 $105.00 

Clothing: 

Suits, etc $48.00 

Shoes (made to order) 30.00 78.00 

Doctor 24.00 

Insurance (for college education and start 

in life, etc.) 300.00 

Carfare to parks 6.00 

Barber i.oo 

Incidentals 24.00 

Dancing school 20.00 

Trained kindergartner 624.00 

$1,182.00 



2o6 Increasing Home Efficiency 

This last budget (III) is about the upper limit 
of cost for a perfectly well child in -the middle 
class. Stripped of those items which are either un- 
usual or in excess of what is generally regarded as 
necessary — trained kindergartner, dancing school, 
large sum for insurance, made-to-order shoes, cer- 
tified milk — even this comes within two hundred 
dollars. 

From the consideration of these budgets, and 
many more in our possession, it seems safe to esti- 
mate the necessary cost of a child between the ages 
of three and five at about one hundred dollars a 
year when the mother is both housekeeper and 
nurse-maid or teacher. This amount will be more 
than doubled where a nurse-maid or governess is 
employed. 

A woman from a small New York town protests 
that these budgets do not present the modifica- 
tions that come with many children in a family. 
She says: 

"The unfortunate parents of the unfortunate 
only child should know that two children do not 
cost twice as much as one, nor three children 
nearly three times as much. There are so many 
things that must be provided for a baby and that 
are outgrown before they are outworn. The first 
long clothes are worn for so short a time that they 
are always ready for a second baby, and usually 
for a third with just a little mending. The baby 
carriage, crib, tub, play yard, high chair and so 
many of the things that make the first baby a seri- 
ous expense, may be handed down to little brothers 



The Cost of Children 207 

and sisters quite indefinitely. Even in the ques- 
tion of food, where pennies are counted very care- 
fully, three children on the average eat perhaps 
twice what one child would of special dishes pre- 
pared for them, and the time and expense of fuel 
are little more in cooking for three or four than for 
one. Then if the mother teaches her own little 
children, surely she will consider her time better 
spent with three or four than with one, and when 
she is not teaching them, they will play content- 
edly by themselves where an only child would need 
more of his mother's attention." 

This is a valid criticism of these estimates, and 
IS met only in part by the fact that all people 
who do have children at all must begin with a first 
one to whom these estimates will apply. A New 
England friend makes a very different sort of an 
objection. She protests against the publication 
of such estimates as these, on the ground that 
"they will discourage young people from having 
children." She voices what seems to be a very 
general superstition, that it is wise to draw a 
pleasant veil over the cost till the offspring have 
actually arrived, because then the parents "will 
have to manage somehow" — as though each child 
arrived holding a certified check for Its mainte- 
nance In one hand and directions for its care in 
the other! 

It is strange that people — really Intelligent 
people sometimes — will still hang on to the medie- 
val Idea that ignorance is an asset. An eastern 
clergyman inquires: 



2o8 Increasing Home EflSciency 

"Is it morally right to Inculcate the thought 
that unless a young couple can foresee as a dead 
certainty that they can send their sons and daugh- 
ters to college, they must not have children? I 
am inclined to think that the real reason why a 
couple with an income of ^1,200 is afraid to assume 
the responsibility of raising a family is because 
they want to keep pace with a family that has an 
income of ^2,400, and the family with ^2,400 wants 
to keep pace with the family with ^3,600, and so 
on." 

Now is one more likely to forego a thing because 
its money cost can be calculated? 

An abstractor of titles from a western city gets 
really quite stirred up over this whole question of 
the cost of children. 

"Going thus into a cold systematic calculation 
of the financial cost of children," he writes, "brings 
In a line of argument indicating a reduction of the 
number of children In a family so that their elders 
may have more time and money for social dissipa- 
tion, or so that the fewer children may have more 
money for long drawn out education. 'Education' 
so-called, meaning long continued schooling, Is a 
great American Moloch to which the children are 
sacrificed. My wife and I have six children, and 
during all our married life have attended strictly 
to business, she In the home and I In my office. 
Like ourselves, we have had none of our children 
go beyond the equivalent of a high school course, 
some of them not quite that. We have come to 
realize that the American people have too much 



The Cost of Children 209 

confounded schooling with education, until educa- 
tion has indirectly come to be so grievous a finan- 
cial load to parents that with the unsatisfactory 
results achieved, makes the raising of children 
seem not worth while. There has arisen an ex- 
cessive and false notion of the duty of parents to 
the children, instead of the older idea of the duty 
of the children to the parents. The parents are 
expected to do too much for the children and they 
become a financial mill-stone around the parents' 
necks. But we are firm in our belief that any writ- 
ing or talking about the cost of them, no matter 
how well-intentioned, has the strongest possible 
effect in discouraging the raising of them. Those 
who really love the babes should taboo all reference 
to cost." 

It does not occur to this irritated gentleman 
that the only way to reduce the cost of children 
so that they can be produced without financial 
hindrance is to understand what the cost is at 
present, and how it can be cut or more easily met. 
There is abundance of evidence to show that the 
number of children in middle-class families is de- 
creasing. Among seventy-six families whose com- 
plete budgets we have, they average less than two. 
Hasn't modern society got over the idea that it 
can destroy its enemies by pulling faces at them 
and calling them names .^ 

Would it conduce to the happiness of a child to 
know itself an inadvertent obstacle between its 
parents and their unrealized ambitions? Rather 
than Ignore the facts, might it not be well to con- 



2IO Increasing Home Efficiency 

sider why, since a child is the most valuable gift a 
person can make to the community, the tax upon 
parents is so high as compared with their resources ? 
What, for example, is the trouble back of such 
plaints as these we have received? 

"My life has been dwarfed in raising my 
family." 

"Our children have their higher efficiency cur- 
tailed in order that they may keep alive." 

"Father and his ambition had to be side- 
tracked to educate us children, so our home must 
be classed as a non-paying one." 

"No teacher in this part of the country can care 
for his children and have any money to spend in 
keeping himself mentally efficient." 

"My wife is a wonderful manager, but no 
amount of management will make the salary my 
congregation pay me large enough to bring up two 
children on." 

"My children say to me, 'Why, papa, can we 
not go on with our education.^' And the only 
answer an indulgent father can make is to say 
frankly, * Children, the family grew faster than 
papa's income, and now I must ask you to help 
through." 

All these good people seem to be surprised and 
hurt. Are not children like flowers, growing of 
God's good grace .^ Well, if we had the statistics 
in black and white, it is probable that we should 
find some cash outlay necessary to raise dan- 
delions; and it wouldn't make them any less wel- 
come in the springtime, either! 



The Cost of Children 211 

Now, such plaints do not appear to be based on 
the "fixed costs" of children, although an analysis 
of many budgets shows that these increase from 
$100 for a child between three and five, to ^128 
when the child is seven years old, ^180 when it is 
between ten and twelve, and $212 when it is be- 
tween fourteen and sixteen. They are based on 
the uncertain costs of middle-class standards, on 
the varying demands for health, and education, 
and a start in life. 

Undoubtedly some of this uncertainty is due to 
the survival of the ancestral idea that our homes 
are isolated units and that their efficiency is to be 
measured not by the value of their social output, 
but by the number of steps above "father" the 
children are enabled to start. This cost cannot 
possibly be laid to the parents' wish to keep pace 
with the family ahead, but is chargeable to un- 
sloughed ancestral ideals. 

Is it not strange that American middle-class 
homes will allow themselves to be crippled finan- 
cially by the need of sending their children to 
private schools and to save money for their college 
courses.^ Is not the right to free education and its 
social advantage, accepted by us all.^ We have 
letters from one family with an income of only 
$2,400 a year, showing how it is trying in vain to 
stagger along under the burden of a son in college 
and two daughters in a private school. This 
family is by no means exceptional; and yet few 
parents even dream of whispering into the public 
ear that it is the business of the State to provide 



212 Increasing Home Efficiency 

free such education as their children ought to have 
— an incontrovertible example of home incom- 
petence. 

But there are homes which are highly efficient 
in getting from the community the sort of school- 
ing for their children that is money in their 
pockets. Mrs. Wyman, a little woman living in 
Foxbrooke, one of those New York suburbs to 
which the "stock and bond" people are prone to 
remove while their children are small, has written 
it into her creed that she must get Reduced Rates 
on the Arts and Sciences. 

"I'm not looking for any bargain-counter educa- 
tion for my children," explained she, severely, 
"nor for any of the machine methods of instruc- 
tion still to be found in the rural districts. I 
don't want them to get down to the level of bare 
intellectual subsistence. I want them to learn 
amply, to be intellectually rich. They've a right 
to it." 

"See here, Mrs. Wyman," protested a neighbor, 
"you're using the wrong word. When you say 
they've a right to it, you imply that it's somebody's 
duty to give it to them." 

"Well, isn't it.?" 

"Why, not if you can't pay for it." 

"But I'm paying for so much more than I'm 
getting already 1" 

"How do you mean.?" 

"Why, I stand ready to furnish a hydraulic 
engineer in Arthur, Jr.; a trained housewife in 
Anne; and so far as the symptoms go, an aviator 



The Cost of Children 213 

in William. Now, society needs all these things. 
It's got to have them, and yet it isn't willing to do 
even what the big corporations do — help me to fit 
them for their jobs. I won't stand it to have 
society parasite on me like thatl" 

"How are you going to prevent it?" we asked. 

"I'm doing it already, and in its blind way 
society is beginning to let go. Oh, the way I've 
got myself disliked makes me feel quite prom- 
inent and successful!" And she laughed as only 
a much-loved woman can. 

But it was true that Mrs. Wyman was making 
enemies. It is inevitable that an unfit form of life 
should dislike the higher form which eliminates it. 
She had become a scourge to the old order, and 
they knew it. Mr. McCann, brother of the Fox- 
brooke contracting carpenter, had treated us to 
the countryside gossip about her. 

"Oh, she's a terrible woman — a terrible woman! 
Went talkin' 'round that our school wa'n't good 
enough for her children! I guess if it was good 
enough fer my children it was good enough for 
her'n. An' then she got the county sup'rintendent 
to say we'd gotta hev a new schoolhouse. Yes'm, 
thet's what she done! An' seein' we'd gotta hev 
it, my brother Jake, he wrote up there that we 
didn't want none o' them stylish buildin's — only 
just a plain schoolhouse. An' he sent in the plans 
like he alius done fer town buildin's. An' if them 
city fellers at Trenton didn't up an' send 'em back 
to Jake again, sayin' they wa'n't right! Well s'm, 
you can bet Jake wouldn't stan' fer that. An' 



214 Increasing Home Efficiency 

him a-backin' out, there wa'n't nothin' but to use 
them plans they sent down from Trenton. An' 
not a soul in this hull town got a thing out o' it! 

"An' it was just 'cause that woman thought 
our schools wa'n't good enough fer her chil- 
dren. I don't see nuthin' about her children 
that's better'n any other people's children. Why 
couldn't she send her children over to Mis' Dacy's 
school at Esterly like the other high-toned people 
done.?" 

Mrs. Wyman laughed when we told her. 

"I don't believe in sending young children away 
to school," said she. "And besides, I can't afford 
it. If I took the price of private schools out of 
Arthur's salary, I'd have to make the children go 
without something they ought to have. Anyway, 
the community wants educated men. Theo- 
retically the public schools are provided for the 
purpose of producing them. All the finances of 
the State are there to pay for the best education 
to be had, so why should I pay for it out of our 
Httle ^3,cxx) a year? I didn't believe in it, so I 
just got five other women to h^lp riie, and we 
found that the State would give us practically as 
much of the things we insisted on having as they 
had in stock. It didn't have everything, so we 
compromised on a teacher of singing and a course 
in Applied Art and they threw in German of their 
own accord. Do you notice that since the schools 
are better, not so many people send their children 
to Esterly.?" 

The "stock and bond" people had been used 



The Cost of Children 215 

to treat Foxbrooke like a great nursery. They 
came there with their babies to get them out of 
the New York streets and to avoid paying New 
York rents, and filled the place with perambula- 
tors. It resounded with infant voices. A private 
kindergarten was established on the hill, to which 
processions of trim little boys in Russian blouses 
and girls in mushroom hats were led every morn- 
ing. But until Mrs. Wyman took hold of the 
public school question, there was no good instruc- 
tion beyond the kindergarten, and the same sense 
of parental responsibility which drove people to 
Foxbrooke with their babies, drove them away 
when their children came of school age. 

Mrs. Wyman has not only helped to make Fox- 
brooke something more than a brief episode in 
people's lives; she has saved money for every 
parent in the town as well as for herself. To her 
own income she has practically added the $150 a 
year which the tuition for Anne in Miss Dacy's 
Collegiate Preparatory Department would have 
cost; ^40 a year for William's tuition in the 
Primary; $150 a year for Junior in the Techno- 
logical Institute in the city; thirty cents a day for 
carfare for the three, and whatever the special 
teachers in music and art would have cost over and 
above the tuition. A very perceptible addition to 
Arthur's salary! 

Mrs. Wyman's achievements in the matter of 
schools are only unique in that it is unusual for 
one little middle-class woman to buck the com- 
munity single-handed, for that was what she has 



2i6 Increasing Home Efficiency 

done. In New York, when the people wanted 
their children to learn stenography and dress- 
making and cooking, these things marched right 
into the curriculum of the public schools. And in 
Chicago, they've got carpenter work and plumb- 
ing, and one school, at least, goes in enough for 
real advancement to buy pictures for its school- 
rooms, at the American Artists' Exhibition and 
the Water Color Show and to offer courses in 
illustrating and embroidery. It may sometimes 
be a little hard to lash a school board into the 
vanguard where it naturally belongs, but if you 
can do things like that in Chicago, it seems prob- 
able that if you want any simple little thing like 
technical training or agriculture put in anywhere 
else, you can get it. 

There is another woman who is reducing the 
cost of her children's education at the same time 
that she is improving its quality through the same 
means as Mrs. Wyman but under the very different 
circumstances of life on a Nebraska farm. She 
is an authority on education, having been a suc- 
cessful teacher, and she knows exactly what she 
wants; the best features of the city schools, adapted 
to country life, plus all the special instruction 
that country children ought to have — about five 
hundred dollars' worth of education per year per 
child, and she wants it for nothing! The country 
schools in her neighborhood were poor and grow- 
ing worse; she can't afford to send her children 
away to school, and even if she could, what joy 
to a parent is an absentee child? It does not look 



The Cost of Children 217 

like an easy proposition, but she is solving it; she 
is bringing the mountain to Mohammed; she is 
making over the rural public school. 

She has begun by getting herself made secretary 
to the school board, the only position open to a 
woman, where she has a voice in appointing the 
teacher and arranging the curriculum, and she 
personally selects the new books to be bought for 
the school library. She admits that the school is 
still far from what she thinks it ought to be. 

"But it's coming on," she insists. "And just 
you wait till Fm through with it!" 

When this spirit of determined progress enters 
the rural districts, it is astonishing what it can 
accomplish. During recent years the State of 
Virginia has been distinguishing itself for the 
energy and brains it has been putting into the 
development of its rural schools. It is a favorite 
saying of Mr. Joseph D. Eggleston, Virginia's 
State Superintendent of Public Instruction, that 
"a man should not be educated to live on his own 
visions and another man's head. Our schools 
should educate our boys and girls so that they 
may have both visions and provisions." This 
spirit is trying to permeate the schools of Virginia. 
An enterprising young principal in the south- 
eastern section of the State has estimated the 
amounts that an adequate system of rural schools 
has saved the families In one district where in the 
absence of efficient public schools, the parents 
formerly sent their children to private academies. 
Here are his figures: 



2i8 Increasing Home Efficiency 

Mr. L. A. 2 girls 6 years $ 1,500.00 

Mr. R. M. I girl 4 " 1,000.00 

Mr. G. J. I boy 3 " 750.00 

Mr. G. A. I boy 4 " 1,000.00 

Mr. E. W. 2 boys 4 " 1,000.00 

Mr. E. J. 2 boys i year 250.00 

Mr. L. F. 2 boys 3 years 750.00 

Mr. B. L. 2 boys 2 " 500.00 

Mr. O. I boy 4 " 1,000.00 

Mr. S. I boy 3 " 750.00 

Rev. Mr. D. 2 girls 2 " (at ^200) 400.00 

Rev. Mr. N. i boy 2 " (at $200) 400.00 

Mr. V. I boy i year 250.00 

Mr. J. E. I girl I " 250.00 

Mr. F. B. I girl 3 years 750.00 

Mr. H. 



f 2 girls 
1 1 b( 



boy 2 " (at $250) 1,500.00 

Total savings in 4 years ^12,050.00 

"These figures seem high," he explains, "but 
in every instance I have taken the financial stand- 
ing of the people and their method of educating 
their children into consideration. I mean that 
these men have older children whom they have 
educated in secondary private boarding schools 
at a cost of not less than ^250 per year. These 
children educated at the public rural high school 
receive more thorough and more efficient training 
than they formerly received In the academies 
and seminaries. And besides the saving of this 
^12,050 to these sixteen parents, there have been 
69 other pupils In the past four years who owing 



X 



The Cost of Children 219 

to the financial condition of their parents would 
probably not have been given any secondary edu- 
cation at all except for the success of our rural 
school campaign." 

What these Virginians did in the matter of 
their high schools is not only good public morals, 
but good private ethics as well. Was it right to 
support a few worthy middlemen as private 
school teachers at the cost of the education of 
these sixty-nine? Was it right to spend that 
$12,050, when it could be used in other ways more 
efficiently.^ Wasn't it just as extravagant as 
buying February strawberries? 

This point of view toward the cost of children 
is so reasonable on the face of it that one is sur- 
prised to find oneself regarding these instances as 
exceptional. 

It is not, perhaps, so strange that middle-class 
people take no means to free themselves froin the 
increasing menace of the doctor's bill. Among 
more than a hundred letters, only one makes any 
suggestion to diminish the increasing cost of health. 
This is from a New York physician, who believes 
that we should have free health as we have, theo- 
retically, free education. 

"The community should demand that the best 
talent be in charge of free hospitals and clinics," 
he writes, " that they should devote all their time 
to their respective fields of service, and be so re- 
munerated as to make public health service not 
only an object of wage-earning, but also an incen- 
tive for greater professional skill." 



220 Increasing Home Efficiency 

This suggestion is likely to offend middle-class 
susceptibilities. Free hospitals and free clinics 
are for the poor, and shall middle-class men and 
women or middle-class children be tarred with the 
brush of pauperism? Precisely the same foolish, 
undemocratic argument that stood for genera- 
tions against the progress of the public school! 
It is strange how we cherish ancestral ideals even 
at the expense of public health and private well- 
being. We used to think that the way to get pure 
water was for every one to keep his own well, — 
like the kings and the feudal lords our fathers 
got rid of. The collection of garbage and sewage 
disposal was once regarded as every man's in- 
alienable right. But even our millionaires today 
condescend to use the public highways and sewers 
and water supplies. And if they didn't we would 
compel them to, because our knowledge of con- 
tagious diseases has made us understand that 
sanitation is not a private affair. When we 
or our children catch measles or scarlet fever or 
small-pox, society steps in, quarantines us, dis- 
infects our homes and declares that we shall not 
be a common nuisance. Only the ancestral tradi- 
tion that says that a man may do with his body 
as he once could with his children, — what he has 
a mind to, still makes it illegal for the public 
doctors to cure our diseases even when they lock 
us up and placard our front doors. 

Except in the case of the Poor! In the case of 
the working-class poor, we have begun to see that 
health has an economic value, and we who employ 



The Cost of Children 221 

workmen and workmen's wives and their children 
are beginning to object to the waste of good labor 
power. Take the mining and manufacturing State 
of Pennsylvania, for example. The law creating 
the present State Department dates from 1905, 
and followed the stamping out of a State-wide 
epidemic of small-pox by certain members of the 
existing staff. To apply to all communicable 
diseases the technique which had won public con- 
fidence in the fight against small-pox was, accord- 
ingly, the department's first obligation. Among 
the well-to-do, who could afford competent phy- 
sicians and commercial anti-toxin, diphtheria had 
lost its old terror; through the work of the German 
scientist Behring, its cure had long since been 
established. But in the State at large, the case 
mortality before 1905 fluctuated between forty- 
five and fifty per cent, i. e., from forty to fifty 
among each hundred who contracted diphtheria 
died. Obviously, diphtheria was essentially a 
problem of poverty, and it was to the poor that 
the department turned. 

Pennsylvania was not without able private 
physicians, neither was it entirely lacking in effi- 
cient local health boards. But the swift, pell- 
mell, anarchistic exploitation of its rich mineral 
resources had bred the mental attitude of the 
mining camp that stakes life lightly on the chance 
of quick wealth. There was abundant evidence 
that the death rate from diphtheria was high; but 
how widely the disease was distributed, precisely 
where the centers of infection were, no one had 



222 Increasing Home Efficiency 

bothered to find out. The community had not 
awakened to the importance of such knowledge. 

The law of 1905 not only requires the reporting 
of all cases of diphthera (as of other communicable 
diseases) by the attending physician, but equips 
the department with adequate police power for 
its enforcement. The moment a case is reported, 
the department sees to the establishment of quar- 
antine either through the local authorities or, in 
their absence, directly. If the patient can afford 
competent medical care, well and good; if not, the 
department supplies the treatment. It supplies 
anti-toxin from its own laboratories, supplies it 
through its own physicians, and takes full re- 
sponsibility for the result. In the Division of 
Medical Inspection through which this curative 
work is done, there are sixty-six medical inspec- 
tors; one hundred and five deputy medical in- 
spectors, who have power to take charge of all 
suspicious cases that appear in railroad stations 
or on trains; six hundred and seventy local health- 
officers distributed throughout the State; and, 
since January i, 191 2, one thousand inspectors 
to safeguard the schools. To facilitate and give 
additional accuracy to the work of this division, the 
department operates laboratories in Philadelphia 
for special microscopic investigations and for the 
manufacture of biological products. From these 
laboratories diphtheria anti-toxin Is distributed 
to the poor through six hundred and fifty-six sta- 
tions located at strategic points in the State. 

If this method is good for the poor, why is it 



The Cost of Children 223 

not good for all of us? Is It better that we should 
choose our doctors by the color of their hair or 
the automobiles they drive, or take our chances 
with clever advertising quacks and patent medi- 
cines ? Literally thousands of middle-class children 
are victims of this middle-class folly each year. 

But, here and there tradition is beginning 
to give way. Only yesterday. Society discovered 
the relation between unenlightened motherhood 
and our huge Infant mortality. 

"Can the Nation afford to lose three hundred 
thousand potential citizens a year?" Society 
began to ask. 

"Certainly not" came the answer: "And since it 
is the poor who cannot pay for skilled physlcans and 
nurses, let us provide them with charity schools." 

And these free schools are proving themselves 
so highly efficient that mothers of all classes are 
turning to them. 

One day we happened in upon one of these 
mothers' schools in upper Manhattan, and found 
a roomful of neatly dressed women of all degrees 
of modest prosperity, some with babies In their 
arms, some expecting babies. Our companion 
was a young college-bred woman who had recently 
had a child of her own. She had been attended 
by a physician of large reputation, assisted by a 
corps of expensive trained nurses. Everything 
had been done for her, except that she had re- 
ceived practically no special Instruction: it had 
only been expected of her that she would do as 
she was told. But her child almost died of im- 



224 Increasing Home Efficiency 

proper feeding during Its first year, and she herself" 
had suffered from the breakdown of her feet, due to 
too much ill-advised walking. It was extremely 
interesting to watch her as the school doctor in- 
structed these student mothers in the science of 
motherhood. They were receiving a preparation 
for their most important work in the world which 
she with her college training and her expensive 
specialist and her trained nurse and her untutored 
maternal instinct had entirely missed. 

And what is true of diphtheria and the problem 
of infancy is true of the entire problem of health 
as it is of the entire problem of education — it is 
to the advantage of society that we should be 
strong and well as much as it is that we should be 
educated for life. Free health will do as much to 
reduce the unnecessary cost of children as free 
education. In New York a movement is on 
foot that will eventually establish the school for 
mothers as a respectable institution. The very 
same thing is happening in this evolution of schools 
for mothers that happened in the rise of our public 
schools. A hundred years ago people discovered 
the connection between literacy on the one hand 
and crime and pauperism on the other. 

"Do we want to have children brought into 
the world, only to have them become burdens 
upon the community.^" Society began to ask. 

"Certainly notl" came the answer. "And 
since it is the poor who cannot afford tutors or 
private academies, we must provide them with 
charity schools." 



The Cost of Children 225 

In 1805, for example, the Free School Society 
was founded in New York to teach the poor their 
letters. Soon all classes in the community saw 
that the school instruction given to the poor was 
infinitely better and more democratic than most 
other people could get for money. Then The Free 
School ceased to be the pauper school; it was 
taken over by the State, and members of all classes 
sent their children to it gladly. 

These three — health, education, and a start in 
life — are the great unknown quantities in the 
money cost of children that imperil the middle- 
class standards of living. But what of those other 
costs — costs of brain and muscle — that also imperil 
the middle-class ideals.^ 

A college professor has got this muscle cost 
down to a time measure. 

"The amount of my wife's time," he says, 
*' taken daily because of the children — including 
the time spent in dressmaking for them, washing, 
ironing, etc. — averages between three and four 
hours. Probably an hour of my time is taken, in 
addition. The necessity of being at home to at- 
tend to the children obliges my wife to forego 
many pleasant social activities, and to curtail 
greatly the time she might otherwise devote to 
benevolence or public objects." He, however, has 
a yard in which his children can safely play with- 
out supervision. 

In the city there would be four or five hours in 
addition spent with the child in the street. 

Now why should it shock any one to find out 



226 Increasing Home Efficiency 

how much time and strength a woman spends on 
her child and how much she loses in other oppor- 
tunities of usefulness to do it? But they do object 
— oh vigorously! 

"It seems such a foolishly short-sighted idea, 
such a sign of diminished spiritual powers," pro- 
tests a mother from New York State, "to count 
up the hours spent in caring for children and the 
pleasant social activities foregone because one's 
continual presence Is needed at home. Would the 
time, if not used In the care of children, and the 
pleasant social activities If enjoyed, have yielded a 
more valuable contribution to social progress than 
the children? I doubt It." 

This mother seems to take it for granted that 
without the mother's "continual presence" the 
children will not contribute to social progress, 
and that the social activities of the mother are of 
no value. Here's a letter from a Pennsylvania 
woman who agrees with her: 

"There are at least two things I must ever re- 
serve for myself If I would be a good mother and 
home maker — one, the personal care of my chil- 
dren, the other, the direct supervision — mostly, 
indeed the actual work — of the preparing of the 
meals, that the health and efficiency of my family 
may be as great as possible. And a woman has 
little call to be Vusty' so long as she has good 
books (I have little time to read myself — my hus- 
band reads me the most important things) and 
interesting friends who still think It worth while to 
come and see her. I hope to have the strength to 



The Cost of Children 227 

devote myself to my children until they shall be 
fortified and equipped for their work in life." 

This is the old spirit of kissing the rod, and it 
has permitted more unnecessary waste and hard- 
ship than any other pernicious heirloom. It's not 
by this sort of inert acquiescence, but by seeing 
that something is wrong and trying to set it right 
that we shall come upon smoother ways. As the 
intelligent mother of three says: 

"I can write and I have a head for facts and 
figures. I would be glad to be of use in the com- 
munity; I don't want to be a social drone; but I 
have my hands full truly, taking care of my chil- 
dren." 

"But," our New England friend might ask, 
"what greater privilege could that woman have 
than to devote herself to her children.^" 

Is it, after all, a question of devotion.^ Most 
women who write us think that they cannot be 
good mothers if they limit their social service to 
their own homes. The ability to educate children 
is not an inherited instinct and obviously it is to 
the advantage of society to get a double value 
from women, if possible. There is a real demand 
for some mother-saving device, particularly while 
the children are young. The only devices we have 
today are the nurse-maid and the kindergarten. 

Oh, that nurse-maid I No one who has merely 
employed a nurse-maid can know her as one who 
has actually been her does. One of us studied the 
American home from the standpoint of a nurse- 
maid for Everybody's Magazine. She has sat 



228 Increasing Home Efficiency 

with her in employment offices looking for a place; 
walked by her side pushing baby-carriages 
through the streets; gone to dances with her and 
helped her entertain her "gentlemen friends"; 
and knows her from the fat-buttoned shoes she 
wears to the way she does her hair. A few trained 
and competent nurse-maids she met in different 
parts of the country, but they aren't a tenth of one 
per cent of enough to go around. And these few 
good, efficient nurse-maids — aren't they the sort 
of women whom it is for the advantage of society 
to allow to marry and bring up their own children? 
And the others — the incompetent sort — ought 
they to be intrusted with any children at all? It 
does not seem that the nurse-maid is a mother- 
saving device from the standpoint of society at 
large, because so much of the work she does badly 
or misdoes has to be done over later at an in- 
creased cost. Here and there groups of women 
are trying to solve this problem by cooperative 
nurseries under trained child-gardeners; the kinder- 
garten solves It for a few hours each day for some 
people; but the problem as a whole has not been 
met. 

The minimum cost of children sums Itself up 
simply enough. It doesn't cost a prohibitive 
amount to clothe and feed and shelter them. Peo- 
ple who believe their duties to their children are 
limited to these three things do not complain of 
the cost. The difficulty Is that it may cost a great 
deal to keep them In perfect physical fitness, to 
educate them, and to start them in life. People 



The Cost of Children 229 

who believe their duties to Include all these things 
are likely to be appalled at the prospect. 

It Is not as though the mothers of the middle- 
class were not satisfied with the amount they have 
to eat and drink and the protective quality of the 
clothes they have to wear. The book the Sage 
Foundation has published on the standard of liv- 
ing In New York says that on ^900 a year "families 
are able, In general, to get food enough to keep 
soul and body together and clothing and shelter 
enough to meet urgent demands of decency." 

Most middle-class women are quite as intelligent 
as any Immigrant's wife. They could certainly do 
as well as our washerwoman, Mrs. Schultz, who, 
with the added burden of an Imbecile husband, has 
brought up a useful family. Mrs. Schultz's three 
boys went to work promptly at fourteen and now 
one of them is clerk for the Consolidated Gas Com- 
pany; another works for a towel supply firm; the 
third Is in a wholesale grocery house; and their 
united Income is ^68 a week. They're all good, 
sturdy German-American boys, eating the good 
boiled potato from the knife-blade, and spending 
happy coatless, shoeless evenings with their 
mother in their little East Side flat which has no 
bath-tub. The young Schultzs are perfectly 
good citizens and their mother Is justly proud of 
them. But the outside limit of their earning power 
is probably $100 a month each, the height of their 
careers will be reached by thirty, and their indus- 
trial places could be filled at a moment's notice. 

In the economical education of middle-class 



230 Increasing Home Efficiency 

children, there are methods less tangible than 
the obvious paying-less-for-what-you-get. They 
might be called "Long Distance Economy" or 
"Expensive Tastes as a First Aid to Thrift," and 
can be practiced by those women who are not try- 
ing to do what Mrs. Schultz has done — produce 
offspring that fit into the community life like in- 
terchangeable parts into a machine — but who are 
striving to produce something much more costly 
and difficult of production — something hard to 
replace and therefore expensive. 

"Only one per cent of the school children go to 
the university, and therefore a university man is 
valuable," they argue. "We will not let our boys 
work now because it will make them worth less 
as men. We will not have their play time stolen 
from them because they may demand it back when 
they are grown up. They shall not go through 
physical bankruptcy — it is too costly. We want 
them to be able to meet competition — not to have 
to evade it by emigration. Our children intend 
to be wonderful creatures and we try to prevent 
their being content to be commonplace. Society 
does not need the commonplace, and we will not 
glut the market with it." 

In producing exceptional children, parents are 
making provision for their own future. The bread 
they are casting upon the social waters is likely to 
return to them jam-spread in time of disaster. 
Their children are not likely to develop the attitude 
of a Vermont farmer who has just sent to New 
York for a destitute elderly woman to do the house- 



The Cost of Children 231 

work without wages for himself, his wife and four 
children, promising that "he would give her the 
same care that his mother would have." The up- 
bringing of middle-class children is practically an 
old-age pension for their parents, though whether 
this is wise economics from the standpoint of the 
community is quite another matter. 

But to produce these exceptionally valuable 
children is far more difficult than getting dancing 
introduced into the schools. It involves, first, 
developing the demands of taste and then satisfy- 
ing them, giving a family a moneyed love of beauty 
and art, a capitalistic taste for real luxuries on a 
salary; that is, the sort of taste which can be bred 
into a race by familiarity with the beautiful things 
the rich can buy, and the leisure to enjoy them. 

"Somehow the disadvantages of ^3,000 a year 
have got to be overcome," said a Philadelphia 
mother, firmly. "Take the matter of clothes for 
Jane. Now she has a perfect right to beautiful 
things and the joy of the changing fashions, and 
she's got to know the real from the imitation. She 
dropped a wish into the air for white furs. White 
furs upon my daughter! But I know just how 
quickly Jane learns from seeing things. I took 
her shopping with me on Saturday and made oc- 
casion to lunch at a cheap restaurant during the 
rush hour. It happened most fortunately. About 
every other shop girl who came in was wearing 
white furs — cheap imitations, in various stages of 
bedragglement. I saw Jane watch set after set to 
its seat and take in the full effect of it in combina- 



232 Increasing Home EflSciency 

tlon with worn black jackets, exaggerated hats 
and shabby shoes. Then in the afternoon I took her 
to a little concert uptown where I thought some 
of those quite well-dressed girls of old Philadelphia 
might be. They were. I could almost see Jane set 
the gentlefolks, and the soft pretty place and the 
lovely music over in a column against the cheap 
imitations. Yes, that white fur anti-toxin worked 
perfectly. The only approach to the subject was 
when she said once: 

"'Wouldn't it be perfectly dandy, mother, for 
you to have a set of ermine T 

"But just the same I know that every one of 
those struggling girls in the white furs and awful 
hats had a right to something better. I say right 
because if beautiful things will make Jane more 
valuable, they'll help the shop girls just as much, 
and if there is one thing that is sure, it is that the 
community cannot afford to have us go without 
anything that makes us more valuable to it. 

"Now, of course, if Jane were a young plutocrat, 
she wouldn't have to acquire good taste herself 
because she could hire it. But as it is, this isn't a 
place where even the law could help her out. I 
have to lead my children personally into that 
realm of taste. 

"I'm trying," said she, "to drive into society 
the idea that people like John and me and our 
children have a right to a good deal because we 
are valuable — much more valuable than the mill 
hands we might have been. And I'm trying to 
drive into the children the idea that a great deal 



The Cost of Children 233 

Is expected of them because they have received 
so much, and because they have inherited a lot 
they could not have been given. At the same time 
I'm impressing on them the fact that they have 
a right to receive a great deal more in return. 
And I try to make them see that what is their 
right is everybody's right. 

"Do you remember the story of the princess 
who was stolen away by the wicked witch and set 
to spin with the peasant girls .^ She sat idle until 
the witch asked her: 

"'Why do you not spin.^' 

"'You must give me a golden wheel,' said the 
princess. 

"So the witch gave her a golden wheel — but 
still the princess did not spin. 

"'Why do you not spin with your golden 
wheel .^' asked the witch. 

"'You must give me silken floss,' said the 
princess. 

"So the witch gave her silken floss — but still the 
princess did not spin. 

"'Why do you not spin with your golden wheel 
and your silken floss .^' asked the witch. 

"'You must bring a great lady to teach me,' 
said the princess. 

"So the witch brought a great lady to teach her 
and the princess began to spin. And the golden 
wheel whirled so fast, and the silken floss twisted 
so tight that the thread was as flne as cobweb, and 
the witch took it up to the palace and sold it to 
the King. 



234 Increasing Home Efficiency 

"'Who spins this fine thread?' asked the King. 

"'One of my maidens,' answered the witch. 

"'How does she do it?" asked the King. 

'"With a golden wheel and silken floss and a 
great lady to teach her,' answered the witch. 

"The King wondered so that he sent his son to 
follow the witch home. And when the prince 
came into the spinning room and saw all the 
peasant girls spinning coarse yarn you could buy 
for a penny, and the princess spinning fine thread 
which was worth a piece of gold, he said : 

"'Pretty maiden, why do you spin such fine 
thread?' 

"'Because I am a king's daughter,' she said. 

"And of course you know what happens after 
that in a fairy story. 

"I only want the best for my children — that's 
what the prince in the fairy story means. Time 
was when there were so few good things somebody 
had to go without, but now we all have every 
chance for usefulness and happiness the whole 
round world affords. Thank Heaven that the 
intelligent discontent of the princess is spreading. 
There's no reason why every peasant girl shouldn't 
have a golden wheel and silken floss and a great 
lady to teach her." 

We were talking the other day with the wife of 
a high-salaried professional man. Before her 
marriage she had been a writer earning a good 
income. She has two children, and, because of 
her unwillingness to have anything but the best 
medical care, the older of them has cost more 



The Cost of Children 235 

than six thousand dollars in seven years. More- 
over, like an increasing number of middle-class 
women, she feels that the public schools are not 
providing the kind of education she wants her 
children to have, and, because she cannot single- 
handedly make the public schools what she thinks 
they ought to be, she has given up her profession 
and is devoting her entire time to training her 
children at home. 

"I wish we could have another child," she said, 
"but, judging by what Alice and Tom have cost 
us, I know we shall have to go without one. Be- 
sides, I'm not a teacher by nature or training, and 
I'm never certain that the care I give them is the 
very best." 

Hitherto society has placed the cost of improv- 
ing the quality of children exclusively upon the ^ 
parents, with the result that, as standards rise, 
homes like that of this professional man feel com- 
pelled to limit their output. This suggests what 
is probably the most serious unanswered question 
in the development of home efficiency — not 
whether people can afford to have children, but 
whether society can afford to have those people 
who are intelligent enough to count the cost, go 
without them. 



CHAPTER XII 

Launching the Child 

MY children are such a comfort," said 
Mrs. Aken, a charming gray haired 
lady. "They have turned out so 
well." 

We agreed that it must be a comfort to have 
one's children turn out well, and then asked our- 
selves if hers really had. 

There was William, the eldest, a Chicago stock- 
broker. He dealt in "public utilities," mining 
stocks, and "industrials," keeping well within the 
range of lawful enterprise. Sometimes we heard 
that he was making money, sometimes that he 
was losing it. On the whole, he grew more affluent 
as the years went by. 

There was her married daughter, Annie, who, 
as her mother said, was "so domestic, and married 
so well." Financially, she had. She has now two 
lovely children who have passed through the 
vicissitudes of babyhood and landed safely in the 
best private school in the city. She has such a 
genius for organization that she does not need to 
keep her hands perpetually on the steering gear of 
her house. She has shifted that burden to the 
servants whom she has trained and whom her 

236 



Launching the Child 237 

husband pays. Hours and hours of free time 
Annie has, while her children are in school and her 
housekeeping goes automatically on. 

Frank Aken was the youngest. He showed a 
bookish tendency at an early age — a dissociated 
bookishness which led him into numismatics and 
a study of the domestic life of Greece. No doubt 
he has turned out well in a sense, for he is teaching 
the classics in a boys' preparatory. He has been 
married some years, but his salary is so small 
that he does not dare to have any children. 

As we considered these three — the stock-broker; 
the woman who considers her life's job finished 
when she has produced two children and has 
trained servants to run a house to hold them; the 
teacher of Latin and Greek, without which studies 
of course no classic education can occur, but to 
the teacher of which society does not pay enough 
to permit his having children — we wondered if 
Mrs. Aken's children had turned out so well, after 
all. They conformed perfectly to the old ideal of 
law-abiding, self-supporting offspring, but if so- 
ciety had been asked, would it have said they were 
valuable.^ 

Now of course the most precious output of the 
home is the child; but to produce it, and feed and 
clothe and educate and bring it to maturity, is 
only part of the problem. Shall one raise lettuce 
or cauliflower or corn only to plow them under.? 
The home must launch its children as the gardener 
must market his vegetables — it is part of the job. 
The difference is that the gardener need only 



238 Increasing Home Efficiency 

consider getting rid of his product, but the home 
must consider the effect of its output on the com- 
munity that assimilates it. 

We have a letter from Mr. Warner, a proud 
father who recently retired from business and looks 
with pride upon what his home has accomplished. 

*'Our children," says he, "attended the common 
school. The eldest had a year in boarding-school 
and considerable money spent for musical training, 
and she married well at nineteen and a half years. 
The next went into the navy as an apprentice at 
sixteen, spent nine years in the Navy and six in 
the Army, where he is now a sergeant. The third 
left home at seventeen to learn a trade. The 
fourth attended high school several years, passed 
a year in a law office, studied two years at law 
school and is now commencing the practice of 
law." 

We gather from Mr. Warner's letter that his 
children are definitely self-supporting. Of course 
the general experience is increasingly against girls 
marrying at so young an age. His daughter may 
be an exception, but girls of nineteen are not 
usually well enough educated or sufficiently ex- 
perienced to make efficient wives or mothers, and 
of course it is not for us to say that so long as we 
have an Army, we do not need sergeants, but fif- 
teen years' training seems a great deal of prepara- 
tion — and, do we need an Army.^ 

There is a good chance that the boy who learned 
a trade is doing something that needs to be done. 
How about the young lawyer? Dr. Henry S. 



Launching the Child 239 

Pritchett, President of the Carnegie Foundation 
for the Advancement of Teaching, says: 

"No small proportion of the American lack of 
respect for law grows out of the presence of this 
large number of men seeking to gain a livelihood 
from the business which ought in the nature of the 
case to support only a much smaller number. 
When six or eight men seek to gain their living 
from the practice of law in a community in which, 
at most, two good lawyers could do all the work, 
the demoralization of society becomes acute. Not 
only is the process of the law unduly lengthened, 
but the temptation is great to create business." 

There's a good chance that the lawyer son is 
helping to demoralize society. 

Both the Akens and the Warners have attained 
the easily accessible ideal of making their children 
self-supporting and respectable. This is purely a 
personal ideal with a purely personal gratification. 
It may not have any relation to the social demand 
at all, since there are many self-supporting, ap- 
parently respectable people for whom society has 
no real need. 

There is, however, a fair proportion of the pop- 
ulation who do not think that respectable self- 
support is enough. They feel that they must 
launch their young in line with their greatest 
ability and inclination, and sit in breathless ex- 
pectancy waiting for their offspring to develop 
tendencies and talents. 

A gentleman from Michigan writes: 

"The trades and professions offer a field wide 



240 Increasing Home Efficiency 

enough and diverse enough so that any young 
man's natural gift may find expression in them. 
And here is the real point — what is a boy's natural 
gift? He could probably succeed along that line 
and would probably fail in any other. A parent 
could wisely use all his discernment in studiously 
learning the natural tastes of his child. Give a 
young man something to do that he likes and help 
him qualify for it!" 

Says a Pennsylvania mother: 

"I found in early life that my son was a sales- 
m.an. I allowed him to develop that talent. At 
nine years he had a little candy stand in the yard, 
also sold flowers. I paid him myself for the work 
he did for me. If I had forced him to stay in 
school, I would have wasted time and money and 
he would not have been able to face the world." 

Another family with an income of only $2,400 
is already beginning to save because its eldest son, 
aged thirteen, has expressed a desire to enter the 
ministry, and it is evident to his parents, first, 
that he should not be thwarted in his laudable 
wish, and, second, that he will probably be un- 
able to support himself if he carries It out. 

We have word from the mother of a sixteen- 
year-old girl in the West who showed a talent 
for drawing. "I have cultivated it," says the 
mother, "ever since Alice was seven. I have given 
her the best training the city affords, but there 
seems to be no market for pictures unless you are 
at the very top of the profession." 

An attorney from Akron, Ohio, has sent us the 



Launching the Child 241 

story of how his son pursued his ambition to be 
a foreign missionary. The boy took two years' 
regular college work, then was transferred to a 
theological seminary. When he was ready to go 
into the field, he could not have accepted a call 
even if he had received one, because his eyes had 
given out under the strain of study. His carefully 
cultivated talent was useless. Says his father: 

"Satisfied that he could not proceed along the 
line of his choice, he came home a broken, dispirited 
young man. He could conceive of no future ex- 
cept to get a shanty and a few chickens. Then 
he thought he could possibly work toward self- 
support." 

He first hired out to a chicken farmer, then 
took a three months' course in the study of poul- 
try. His eyes grew increasingly better as he re- 
moved them from print and focused them on the 
hen. He was offered a position as foreman of a 
poultry experiment station. His practical work 
gave him finally a degree in poultry culture, and 
he is now a professor in full charge of the poultry 
extension work throughout the State — a success- 
ful man. He is said to be the best poultryman in 
America, but he has not succeeded through his 
effort to follow his inclinations into the heart of 
China, but through stumbling on the social need of 
better chickens and more eggs. The fact is that 
his life came near being wrecked because he was 
educated merely in the line of his inclinations 
without regard either to his aptness for the job — 
as the failure of his eyesight showed — or to whether 



242 Increasing Home Efficiency 

there was any market for him when he should 
be a completed product. 

That's the trouble with the idea that a child's 
career must lie in the direction of its inclination. 
It's only a fraction of the truth, as the idea that a 
child must become self-supporting is only a frac- 
tion. What's the use of being able to do some- 
thing superlatively well if society doesn't need 
to have that particular thing done at all? And 
how repugnant to the feelings of a child, shaped 
carefully like a peg to fit a square hole, to find that 
advancing civilization in the shape of some swift- 
whirling gimlet has made all holes round! 

Parents will launch their children somehow, 
and this parental drive, whether it focuses itself 
merely on making the children self-supporting or 
on cultivating their incipient talents, is an enor- 
mous social force — how strong we have never 
known, because so much of it is wasted in blindly 
pawing the air. 

We have a letter from a widow with an income 
of $1,500 a year, who is bending all her life to 
the education of her two sons, at the continual 
sacrifice of herself. She does the housework in 
order that they may have dancing lessons. She 
cuts her yearly expenses for clothes to $115 a 
year, while each son has, as she says, an allowance 
of $150 a year, "which has thus far suflficed for 
gentlemanly clothing and the expenses of ath- 
letics." She saves on everything, cheering herself 
the while "with the vision of the end this economy 
is meant to accomplish." 



Launching the Child 243 

"I cannot say how we shall manage matters 
when It comes to a university course," she writes, 
"but I do quite confidently expect to manage 
somehow. We have talked of the Government 
foreign service, diplomatic or consular, as a pro- 
fession for them. Surely a university education, 
a speaking knowledge of three languages, good 
health, and a trained judgment ought to lead 
toward paths of distinction." 

Not necessarily! 

Only a few weeks ago a man came to our door 
with a thinly veiled plea for money. Said he: 

"Nobody wants a man around when he ain't 
got nothin'. Why, even these Mills Hotels that 
some rich man built for the poor man — do I get a 
chance to stay In them.^ No. They're all full of 
these college fellows out of a job. There ain't 
no room in 'em for a working-man." 

The time has gone by when a speaking knowl- 
edge of three languages and a trained mind Insures 
an income, and the cost of acquiring them Is very 
high, although the Idea still survives that boys and 
girls can work their way through college. 

Says one gentleman from Michigan: "I think 
any young man or young woman with a good 
brain, abundant grit, and good physique can ac- 
quire a college education without Injury to them- 
selves. Probably the more they have invested 
personally, the greater the treasure will be." 

Many people do get through college this way, 
but It Is questionable whether any one who has 
stood up under a good stiff college course himself 



244 Increasing Home Efficiency 

would advise any boy or girl to add self-support 
to the burden. 

We have the record of a farmer's son who wanted 
to be a civil engineer. He left home with ^70 to 
undertake a four years' course in Purdue Uni- 
versity. He has now struggled along three years, 
having had about $300 by way of assistance from 
his father, and is paying his way and a little more. 
This cost of a little over $100 a year for keeping 
a boy in college is the lowest of which we have 
any record. 

A well-to-do business man from Chicago writes 
that the cost of sending his daughters through 
college has been approximately $2,000 each. Both 
of them have become teachers at adequate salaries, 
so it would seem that this outlay of $4,000 has 
been sufficient to educate and launch these girls. 

Two boys at Dartmouth cost approximately 
$600 a year each. 

The expenses of a Pennsylvania minister's 
daughter at Smith have averaged $828.04 a year. 

Writes the mother of a boy whose college course 
cost $1,800 a year: "People should remember that 
if boys and girls are brought up on good food, 
comfortable rooms, and decent clothes, they can- 
not do with less when away. I worked much 
harder while he was in college than ever before 
or since. I did with less help in the house, but I 
was determined that the pleasure of sending the 
boy where he could learn should not be a burden 
to my husband, and thus become a trouble in- 
stead of a joy. The third year of his course he 



Launching the Child 245 

gave out with nervous exhaustion. He was not 
used to city life, and never had good judgment 
about what he could endure. He was not able to 
do anything until a year ago, and was also a very 
great expense — so much that I do not want to 
know how much." 

There seems to be no point above which the 
expenses of college students may not rise, but the 
average of those we have analyzed, counting out 
students from families with incomes of more than 
^6,000, or students who have received scholarships 
or worked their way through, is ^665 a year. Now, 
what will happen to that unselfish mother with 
$1,500 a year if over $1,300 of it goes to her two 
sons' education.^ Suppose she does manage to 
somehow put them through the university, and 
then they don't fit into any needed work.^ It 
has happened to others. It might happen to her. 
It is a social calamity to have that sort of splendid 
parental force wasted — wasted In launching chil- 
dren in stagnant ponds. In backwaters that lead 
no where. In rapids and swift currents that need 
not be navigated. 

A letter came today from a woman whose hus- 
band was practically crowded out of the career 
that his college course opened to him, and who has 
gone to the Yakima Valley to start again In work 
that will meet the specific demand of that region. 

"There are hundreds of people here who have 
found the professions overcrowded In the East," 
she writes. "Fruit culture appeals to their scien- 
tific training, and they are succeeding as fruit 



246 Increasing Home Efficiency 

ranchers." She says that to start over in this 
new work, it is necessary for them to hire out on 
fruit farms to get the practical side of the work, 
and to take winter courses at the agricultural 
college for the theoretical side. "The work," 
says she, "calls for expert knowledge of soils, 
irrigation, pruning, controlling insect pests and 
fungous growths, and a multitude of other things." 
These people, having been fitted to a profession 
where there was no demand for them, must be 
re-educated before they can make a living. It 
is, to say the least of it, a wasteful proceeding. 
Everywhere in the country we are throwing away 
not only the drive of that applied parental affec- 
tion, but the child's career as well, and we're doing 
it chiefly through ignorance. We do not know 
either what the community needs in the way of 
applied middle-class brains or what it is willing 
to pay for — which may be quite a different thing. 
We have, to be sure, a general idea that there are 
more manufacturers of ladies' cloaks in the New 
York Ghetto than can make a living, more book- 
keepers and stenographers and clerks than can 
survive in Chicago, too many doctors and lawyers 
everywhere, but nobody knows how many or 
why. Nobody has yet noosed the law of proba- 
bilities sufficiently long to find what industrial 
output is needed from the middle-class home. 
We go on blindly producing at great cost in money 
and effort without knowing whether the product 
is needed or not. It is only in reference to wage- 
workers that we are beginning to take serious 



Launching the Child 247 

thought for the misfits and unemployed. The 
growth of bread lines and slums, of vagrancy and 
pauperism and crime, the high infant mortality, 
the increase in juvenile delinquency and prosti- 
tution, the spread of tuberculosis and kindred 
diseases of neglected poverty, are not only be- 
ginning to cost more than we like to pay for courts 
and jails, public health and public charity, but 
are also undermining our industrial efficiency so 
that we are threatened by the competition of 
more foresighted and socially intelligent nations. 
For long generations we assumed precisely the 
same attitude toward unemployment among the 
wage-workers that we still hold toward the mis- 
fits and unemployed in the middle class, — every 
man for himself and the devil take the hindmost, — 
as if we were not all concerned with the devil's 
harvest, as if the failure of any one individual 
were not a social waste for which we and our 
children must pay! 

Happily, in one State at least, the tragic wreck- 
age of the panic of 1907 shook this dangerous 
complacency. In June, 1910, the New York 
State Commission on Employers' Liability and 
Unemployment sent a questionnaire to more than 
five thousand employers, representing every in- 
dustry in the State, seeking information about the 
fluctuations in the number of their employes 
from year to year and month to month, the sources 
of their labor-supply, and their methods of secur- 
ing workers. At the same time the secretaries of 
more than two thousand trade-unions were asked 



248 Increasing Home Efl&ciency 

to report the number of their members who were 
unemployed during the year, and to describe the 
effect of lost wages upon the working-men's fam- 
ilies. This information the Commission supple- 
mented from the various investigations by the 
United States Department of Labor into wages 
and the cost of living, from all available State 
documents dealing with unemployment, from 
the quarterly reports of trade-unions to the New 
York State Commissioner of Labor, from the 
special Federal censuses of manufactures made in 
1904 and 1905, from the records of charitable 
societies, commercial and philanthropic employ- 
ment agencies, and other kindred sources. Upon 
this broad basis of fact the Commission framed 
its conclusions, the chief of which is that "unem- 
ployment is a permanent feature of modern in- 
dustrial life everywhere. In the industrial centers 
of New York State, at all times of the year, in 
good times as well as bad, there are wage-earners, 
able and willing to work, who cannot secure em- 
ployment." 

This is the great fact which today challenges 
serious attention; for it involves all our social 
and economic problems — it gauges the social 
efficiency of our industries, it is fundamental to 
the physical health of the nation, it is basic to the 
problems of destitution, the dependency of chil- 
dren, vagrancy, and crime. And it applies to the 
middle class quite as much as it does to the wage- 
workers. 

Of seven hundred and twenty-three employers 



Launching the Child 249 

who replied to the question, "Are you always able 
to get all the help you want?" sixty-seven per cent 
answered, "Yes." At the same time eighty-seven 
per cent stated that they got their help wholly or 
mainly from workmen who made personal applica- 
tion at their factory doors. In few establishments 
do they even have to hang out a sign, "Hands 
Wanted," or blow the whistle, as the canning 
factories do, to announce that fresh loads of fruit 
or vegetables have made places for more workers. 
They have rather to protect themselves from 
importunities by placards like those one sees 
outside almost every building in process of con- 
struction: "No Carpenters Wanted" — "No Brick- 
layers Wanted" — "No Steamfitters Wanted" — 
"No Workmen of any Sort Wanted." 

"It is apparent," says the Commission, "that 
many workmen must be going from plant to plant 
in vain." To what extent this Is true of the middle 
class most of us know through bitter experience. 

Of one hundred and seventy-nine trade-union 
secretaries who replied to the question, "Are there 
at all times of the year some of your members out 
of work?" fifty-three per cent answered, "Yes." 
Only eight per cent said that their members lost 
no time through unemployment, while twenty- 
five per cent replied that their members lost an 
average of three months or more In the year. The 
reports of the New York State Department of 
Labor, covering a period of seven years, show that 
in ordinary times at least fifteen per cent of the 
organized workers of the State are idle during the 



250 ^ Increasing Home Efficiency 

winter months, while even during October, the 
month of maximum industrial activity, the per- 
centage of unemployment among skilled workers 
does not drop below five. During years of panic 
and industrial depression the limits both of max- 
imum and minimum unemployment rise sharply, 
and the recorded idle among the best trade-unions 
range from fifteen to more than thirty-five per 
cent. 

These figures deal entirely with skilled work- 
men. No comparably accurate data were procura- 
ble to show the extent to which the unskilled suf- 
fer from worklessness. Such facts, however, as 
the Commission was able to gather, furnish an 
interesting index to the truth. During 1910 the 
Free Municipal Lodging House in New York City 
gave shelter to more than thirty-three thousand 
homeless and penniless men and women, most of 
whom, though unemployed, were "by no means 
unemployable." In this same year the Salvation 
Army had five thousand applicants for work, for 
only five hundred of whom was it able to find 
places; and the National Employment Exchange, 
an agency conducted at great expense by a small 
group of financiers, found work in eighteen months 
for only four thousand, six hundred and fifty- 
seven out of approximately twenty-four thousand 
applicants. 

Too much weight is not to be given to these 
figures; undoubtedly many of the work-hunters 
registered with more than one agency, and in many 
cases positions were left unfilled because none of 



Launching the Child 251 

the long list was qualified to meet their special 
requirements. They do, nevertheless, indicate the 
silt that is seeping through the foundations of our 
American homes. 

Always it must be remembered that unemploy- 
ment is not a disease of panic years which can be 
met by emergent relief; its evils are not necessarily 
most serious when the number of unemployed is 
largest. The important questions are: How many 
workers do the industries of the State normally 
require.^ To how many can they give steady em- 
ployment.^ and, How many do their fluctuating 
demands keep in the reserve army of casual 
workers ? 

The Federal census of manufactures shows that 
about ten per cent of the wage-earners of New 
York State form a reserve to meet the varying 
monthly demands; that fully one-third of those 
who are employed at the busiest times are out of 
employment, or are compelled to lose time in going 
from job to job during the year. Of 37,194 es- 
tablishments, only forty per cent were in operation 
for the full year; nineteen per cent lost a month or 
more, and eight per cent were shut down half the 
time. " Investigations of over four thousand wage- 
earners' families in the State," says the Commis- 
sion in its summary, "show that less than half of 
the bread-winners have steady work during the 
year." 

What is the effect of this industrial turbulence 
upon the efficiency and stability of our homes? 

It has been customary in New York to adopt 



252 Increasing Home EflSciency 

the conclusion of Dr. Robert Coit Chapin, that 
for an average working-man's family consisting of 
two adults and three children, or four adults, "an 
income under eight hundred dollars in New York 
City is not enough to permit the maintenance of a 
normal standard; families having from nine hun- 
dred to a thousand a year are able in general to 
get food enough to keep soul and body together, 
and clothing and shelter enough to meet the most 
urgent demands of decency." Because, however, 
seventy-five per cent of the trade-unions under 
consideration were located in the smaller cities of 
the State, the Commission conservatively adopted 
seven hundred dollars as the amount upon which 
a family "can barely support itself, provided that 
it is subject to no extraordinary expenditures by 
reason of sickness, death, or other untoward cir- 
cumstance." 

The secretaries of two hundred and eleven trade- 
unions reported that if employment had been con- 
stant, the average income of slightly more than 
half their members would have risen to a thousand 
dollars a year, while in only four per cent would it 
have been less than seven hundred dollars. But 
owing to the inconstant demand for labor, the 
average income actually fell below seven hundred 
dollars in twenty-five per cent of the membership, 
and reached a thousand dollars in only fourteen 
per cent. 

These figures are, of course, corrected for strikes; 
they represent normal conditions. Moreover, 
they deal only with a group of skilled, and there- 



Launching the Child 253 

fore well paid, trades. They leave to the imagina- 
tion the economic status of the unskilled and 
casual workers, whose periods of unemployment 
are longer and more frequent, and who, even If 
they were employed six days a week, the year 
round at the usual wage, could not earn more than 
five hundred and fifty dollars. The dock-workers 
are, perhaps, the most typical of these casual 
laborers. In every city or town that has shipping 
by ocean, lake, or river, they are to be found, either 
idling about waiting for a job, or working night 
and day, loading and unloading vessels. New 
York City alone has between forty and fifty thou- 
sand of them, not more than half of whom are 
working any one day. What do they do between 
whiles.^ The Municipal Lodging House gives the 
history of some of them. They wash dishes in a 
restaurant for a few days; they help to fix up Madi- 
son Square Garden for a show; they do building 
laborers' work for awhile; help a team driver when 
an extra man is needed; distribute directories and 
telephone books, and pack and ship goods in a 
department store during the Christmas season. 
How shall their families adjust their living to such 
wage-earning? Or how long will It take an Indus- 
trial system that presupposes a man to have no 
family to produce the thing it demands .^^ 

Of course It may be justly said that the full 
weight of lost income due to unemployment is 
not always felt through a lowered standard of 
living in a working-man's family. When he is out 
of a job, his wife goes to work, his children go to 



254 Increasing Home Efficiency 

work, and In this way the home may be kept to- 
gether. In city parks and playgrounds, able- 
bodied men taking care of babies and young chil- 
dren while their wives and older children are at 
work are common enough. But from the stand- 
point of the homes and the State's interest, these 
can hardly be considered satisfactory adjustments. 
For the children of unemployed or under-employed 
workers, neglected in their early years because 
their mothers must go to work, are frequently 
forced to enter industry, untrained and physically 
handicapped, by way of the first job that offers; 
and as they grow up they drift out of the "blind 
alleys" of makeshift occupations, to swell the hosts 
of casual, unskilled labor. 

And it isn't as though the unemployed man 
would rebound into estimable respectability when 
given a job. One who has listened to the perfervid 
denunciations of society by the street-corner 
orator, whose emotions have been set aflame by 
the sight of the righteous man forsaken and his 
seed begging bread, is curiously impressed by the 
clear echo of the agitator's language in the State 
Commission's report. 

"The unemployed man walks the street in 
search of work, hopeful at first, but as time goes 
on becoming more and more discouraged. The 
odd jobs he picks up bring an uncertain and very 
insufficient income. His whole life becomes un- 
steady. From under-nourishment and constant 
anxiety his powers — mental, moral and physical — 
begin to degenerate. Soon he becomes unfit for 



Launching the Child 255 

work. The merely unemployed man becomes 
inefficient, unreliable, good-for-nothing, unemploy- 
able. His family is demoralized. Pauperism and 
vagrancy result." 

These conditions are not peculiar to New York. 
The recently published Federal inquiry into the 
reasons why six hundred and twenty children In 
selected manufacturing towns in Rhode Island, 
Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Georgia left 
school to go to work, shows that thirty per cent 
went into industry under pressure of starvation, 
and another twenty-eight per cent because the 
parents were not able to maintain such a standard 
of living as seemed to them imperative without 
their children's assistance. In this Federal report 
the most significant piece of information is rele- 
gated to a foot-note in the smallest type: "In the 
period between the children's going to work and 
the investigation, one hundred and ninety-two 
fathers had been unemployed for varying periods. 
Using the fullest information obtainable, there 
seemed only eighteen cases (concerning two and 
eight-tenths per cent of the children studied) in 
which the father's lack of work seemed attributable 
to his own Indolence, Intemperance, or other fault." 

It is from the ranks of these child-workers, 
whom destitution pushes prematurely into the ma- 
chine of industry, that our criminals are increas- 
ingly recruited. The latest governmental study 
in juvenile delinquency and Its relation to employ- 
ment shows that the percentage of delinquent 
children is nearly five times as great among 



256 Increasing Home Efficiency 

those who work as among those who are at 
school. 

Uncertain and insufficient wages, Juvenile delin- 
quency, crime, and prostitution — this is the array 
of evils that is breaking up our homes; and the 
parent of them all is unemployment. 

Confronted by such facts, it is idle to cling to the 
illusion that America is a bucolic neighborhood of 
freehold homes, or to declaim against a program of 
remedial legislation as an unwarranted interference 
with personal liberty. What personal liberty have 
the hungry? At such a time academic discussion 
becomes both inhuman and unpatriotic; what we 
need is an enlightened statesmanship. 

Against the dark background of the New York 
Commission's general findings one cheerful fact 
stands out. While thousands look for work and 
cannot find It, scores at least of positions remain 
unfilled. So long as business men rely upon the 
chance-come applicant at their factory doors, there 
must always be times when places requiring special 
types of labor will continue empty. Moreover, it 
is notorious that there are times In the year when 
farmers cry In vain for hands, and always there 
are lost opportunities for agricultural workers be- 
cause the means of communication between the 
manless job and the jobless man are inadequate. 

Because common sense suggests that this un- 
satisfied demand for labor is the readiest means of 
grappling with the problem of unemployment, the 
Commission gives first place In Its list of Imme- 
diately practicable remedies to a generously fi- 



Launching the Child 257 

nanced and State-wide system of free employment 
offices. Would a manufacturer in need of raw 
material tack up a sign, "Cotton Wanted," or 
"Lumber Wanted?" Why should the labor 
market alone be left unorganized? 

It is the English system which the New York 
Commission has taken for its model. After years 
of futile experiment with Distress Committees and 
Relief Work — futile because it was impossible to 
give really useful work to the idle without taking 
it away from the employed — the English govern- 
ment passed the Labor Exchange Act of 1909. 
In February of that year the Board of Trade 
opened ninety exchanges, and increased the num- 
ber to one hundred and forty-two in 1910. The 
kingdom is divided into ten administrative dis- 
tricts. Three times a day each exchange sends to 
the central district office a list of all positions it is 
unable to fill, and a similar list is exchanged among 
the ten divisions once or twice weekly. Channels 
of regular intercommunication net the kingdom. 
When necessary the government pays the cost of 
transportation of the workman, then collects it 
from the employer, who in turn deducts it from the 
workman's wages. At the head of each of the ten 
districts is a divisional officer, who is assisted by a 
committee of employers and workmen. The ex- 
changes do not advance transportation to places 
where strikes are on, or where the wages offered 
are below the prevailing rates. Already, in their 
second year, the exchanges were finding jobs for 
about fifteen hundred workers daily. 



258 Increasing Home EflBciency 

A Juvenile Advisory Committee, composed of 
workmen, employers, and educators, who protect 
the children against "blind alley" jobs, is provided 
for in each district. The need of hitching up the 
schools with industry is revealed by the fact that 
in 1909 forty per cent of the positions found by the 
exchanges could not be filled because properly 
trained workers were not available. 

In the main this is the system recommended by 
the New York Commission, whose bill includes 
provision for cooperation with employers and 
trade-unionists, notice of strikes, and special 
facilities for children between the ages of fourteen 
and eighteen. 

We have pretty definitely grasped the idea that 
the labor market must be organized, because it is 
for the social advantage that the trades should be 
neither over nor under-supplied with workers; but 
it seems to shock people inexpressibly to think 
that the demand for ministers and teachers and 
doctors should be put in the class with that for 
bricklayers and plumbers. And yet the problem 
is quite as acute in the middle class as among 
the wage-workers. Take the profession of medi- 
cine, for instance, a calling of the social value of 
which there can be no question, and which is largely 
recruited from the middle class. The introduction 
of the Carnegie Foundation's Report on Medical 
Education says: 

"In a society constituted as are our Middle 
States the interests of the social order will be 
served best when the number of men entering a 



Launching the Child 259 

given profession reaches and does not exceed a 
certain ratio. . . . For twenty-five years past 
there has been an enormous over-production of 
medical practitioners. This has been in absolute 
disregard of the public welfare. Taking the United 
States as a whole, physicians are four or five times 
as numerous in proportion to population as in 
older countries, like Germany. ... In a town 
of 2,000 people one will find in most of our States 
from five to eight physicians, where two well- 
trained men could do the work efficiently and make 
a competent livelihood. When, however, six or 
eight physicians undertake to gain a living in a 
town which will support only two, the whole 
plane of professional conduct is lowered in the 
struggle which ensues, each man becomes intent 
upon his own practice, public health and sanita- 
tion are neglected, and the Ideals and standards 
of the profession tend to demoralization. . . . 
It seems clear that as nations advance in civiliza- 
tion, they will be driven to . . . limit the number 
of those who enter [the professions] to some rea- 
sonable estimate of the number who are actually 
needed." 

And In the face of this there were In 1910 
23,927 students in preparation to further congest 
the profession of medicine! It's a perfectly in- 
excusable waste, for, though there's much the 
statistician hasn't done, there's little he can't 
do when he sets his mind to It. If he can estimate 
the market for the output of a shoe factory, why 
not the market for the output of a professional 



26o Increasing Home Eflficiency 

school? It ought to be possible to tell how many 
crown fillings the people of Omaha will need in 
their teeth in 1920 and just how many dentists 
must be graduated from the dental schools in 
time to do it. 

Of course, no one home can command the nec- 
essary information to organize the market for 
middle-class service; it can be had only through 
some form of community effort. If it is good busi- 
ness to hire experts to show us how to get the 
maximum power out of the energy stored up in a 
ton of coal, isn't it even better business to hire 
experts to show us how to get the maximum power 
from the middle-class homes? Isn't it, as a matter 
of fact, important to the Nation to have the pre- 
cious assets of professional brains conserved and 
applied exactly when and how we need them? 

And it's beginning to be done. Here and there 
the facts about some special business or profession 
are being put together, and the chances in it, or 
the lack of them, brought to light. The Vocation 
Bureau of Boston for example published in 191 1, 
together with studies of the baker and machinist, 
a little pamphlet on the architect, to show the 
people of Boston how their boys may become 
architects, and what the chances of money and 
success in that profession are. It insists on the 
requirements of "good health, good habits, and 
good eyesight," so those handicapped will not 
enter it. It says: "Professional education is by 
far the best. One cannot well educate oneself 
for an occupation having such high requirements," 



Launching the Child 261 

and adds: "The majority entering the profession 
remain draughtsmen permanently, at pay varying 
from $20 to $35 a week." The report does not 
publish an estimate of the number of architects 
who could find work in the country, or even in 
and around Boston, but it does say: "There are 
very great opportunities for young men of vary- 
ing talents and abilities. ... It has the future 
of an important occupation." 

A little vague, but a beginning. Why should 
not this, and much more, be done for all profes- 
sions and businesses? Why is it not worth the 
while of the Nation to see that this firing into 
the blue should stop in child launching as well as 
gun practice? Does the gunner on a battleship 
push and pull at a gun till it looks right to him? 
Far from it. He has the range given him by his 
superior officer, and he aims that gun by what 
looks to the unsophisticated eye like applied trig- 
onometry. Why not perform a similar mathe- 
matical feat in launching a child? Isn't it quite 
as important to launch a productive child as a 
destructive shell? 

Society may even find it to its advantage to do 
what some of the great businesses do. Finding 
that the Nation does not automatically produce 
the sort of skilled mechanics they need, they 
have taken the raw material that society does 
furnish and made it into competent workmen 
at their own expense, just as a furniture factory 
makes pine trees into rocking-chairs. Several 
great corporations have found it to their advantage 



262 Increasing Home Efficiency 

to educate free of charge the people whom they 
wish for definite uses. How does society, which 
produces many things, differ from a factory which 
produces one thing? Will not the same principle 
hold? If we could so coordinate and specialize 
our social activities that no man should be edu- 
cated to a profession where there was not room 
for him, if the child was made to fit the demand, 
would it not automatically absorb him? And 
would society not conserve an immense amount 
of precious human energy that is now wasted in 
blind fumbling about? 

At present we have all over the country unsatis- 
fied economic demands and undemanded economic 
supplies. We have laid in a stock of workers in 
unneeded lines and left much of the needed work 
of the world undone. No doubt it is a left-over 
brain process from our ancestral nomadic stage 
that makes us talk of wringing a living from the 
world. That was probably what people once 
literally did, but it is no longer necessary. In 
fact, it has come to be mere short-sighted folly. 
There is plenty. If we followed an intelligent 
plan of social housekeeping, we should find that 
there are three jobs for each man instead of three 
men for each job. The necessity of fighting with 
the world for a living is past, and the world loses 
in permitting it to go on. A man's choice of pro- 
fession is not his own business. It is a social 
question, and one that so far as the middle class 
is concerned, has hardly begun to be solved. 



CHAPTER XIII 
Savings and Efficiency 

WE'VE a friend whose recipe for story- 
writing is: "Take a block of large yel- 
low paper and a soft pencil; place all 
unpaid bills on the upper left-hand corner of your 
writing table — the result is literature." 

But she's the one exception we know to the rule 
that a mind must be free from the hundred pinches 
and pulls of money worry to turn out its most 
valuable product. 

Most of us know how visions of our children 
in want and ourselves helpless through old age, 
will switch our minds from the legal case we may 
be working out, turn our calculations on the strain 
of Iron girders to foolishness, lift our brushes from 
the canvas and our pencils from the paper, or 
break our voices as we lecture to our classes. If 
we had the choice of an incentive, wouldn't we 
prefer the love of our work and the certainty of a 
reasonable reward to the fear of what might hap- 
pen to us if we failed? Wouldn't a man run better 
In the joyous hope of taking an Olympic prize 
than In the deadly fear of pursuing growls in the 
forest.^ Why, then, do we torment all our pro- 
ductive years with the fear of a helpless old age and 
dependency? 

263 



264 Increasing Home Efficiency 

"It IS well to take an optimistic view of the 
future," writes the wife of a New England pro- 
fessional man, "and every man and woman who 
dares to found a home with only the earnings of 
the father for its support are true apostles of hope; 
but it is sheer folly not to set aside what will spare 
them the dependence which is the bitterest drop 
in the cup of old age. No magic can spend one 
dollar twice. If we are to educate our children and 
achieve even partial provision for sickness and the 
non-productive years, it must be by the old hard 
road of going without." 

And so she does what most women of her group 
ordinarily do — the wives of the doctors, lawyers, 
architects, journalists, scientists and engineers 
who, according to our seventy-six budgets, have 
an average income of ^2,598.32 a year — cuts 
down on travel and recreation and service in order 
to put between three and four hundred a year 
into savings, ignoring the fact that she is spending 
an undue proportion of her income on the health 
of her family in consequence, and the fact that 
even if she can keep up this saving for twenty years 
she will only have laid by enough for an annual 
income of ^420 — a good deal less than she and her 
husband will need for decent living. 

We have the family budgets of a series of high 
school teachers and college professors, men on 
salaries ranging from ^1,200 to ^4,000 a year, and 
scattered across the country from Maine to Cali- 
fornia; and in every case but one it is easy to see 
how old age and the fear of it is like a para- 



Savings and Efficiency 265 

lyzing hand to mar the present efficiency of their 
homes. 

As the second bulletin of the Carnegie Founda- 
tion shows, the majority of the teachers in America 
receive salaries below the comfort line, though 
that line varies greatly for different localities in 
accordance with the local cost of living. Now 
teachers who are continually worried by money 
are in no state to turn out their best work, either 
as teachers or home-makers. Their salaries may 
not look so small in money, but it is important to 
realize the difference between a salary that is 
comfortable to live on and a salary that is com- 
fortable to save on; for the fear of the future in a 
profession in which the average income even of 
college professors at the height of their earning 
power is only ^2,500 a year drives men to save 
as the only way to provide for the future, and 
tends to reduce the amount of money they are 
at liberty to spend on their homes and their pro- 
fessional equipment to a point below the efficiency 
line. 

It doesn't matter in the long run whether they 
are content to cut down their home budgets below 
the point of efficiency or not — cheerfulness under 
misfortune undoubtedly makes things pleasant for 
the neighbors, but it isn't a good social substitute 
for a strong-fisted campaign of prevention. There 
is plenty of cheerfulness among the teachers just 
above the line of decency, and a tendency to make 
the intangible receipts of inspiration, and con- 
sciousness of their noble calling, and various other 



266 Increasing Home Efficiency 

comforting platitudes, piece out mere beef and 
potatoes, till one feels pretty sure that the scholar's 
stoop comes as much from underfeeding as from 
overstudy. Teachers, or their wives, living on 
$1,500 a year and less have a fashion of writ- 
ing: 

"Our monthly expenditures average around $50, 
and we think we are living high." 

"Our salary looks pretty big to us, because we 
have so many dear friends who have so much 
less." 

"Our professors here are fine, upright, happy 
people, and all on $1,200 a year or less." 

"We deny ourselves in none of our needs and 
pleasures."' 

"Counting all candy, ice-cream, and every 
eatable, our food average for a day is not above 
twenty cents." 

To read these brave letters, gives one a happy 
warmth in the heart which lasts just exactly till 
we analyze the family budgets that go with them. 
Here is the best and most reasonable budget we 
have been able to get from any teacher with an 
income of $1,500 or less. It comes from Mrs. 
Brownson, a cheerful, happy woman in a section 
of the Middle West where living is so cheap that 
her husband's high school salary of $1,200 will 
go further than would seem possible to an Eas- 
terner: 



Savings and Efficiency 267 

Budget of a High School Teacher in the Middle 
West, Wife, and Child Four Years Old 

Income: $1,200.00 a year, salary. 

20.00 from private lessons. 

$1,220.00 

Food $180.00 

Shelter (rent and water tax) 121.50 

Clothes, etc 140.00 

Operating Expenses: 

Coal, wood, ice $50.00 

Gas and laundry 20.00 70.00 

Advancement: 

Church 30.00 

Y. M. C. A. & Y. W. C. A 10.00 

Summer school i35-oo 

Insurance 140.00 

Vacation 50.00 

Doctor 10.00 

Bank 325.00 

Magazines, papers, books 7.00 

Incidentals 1.50 708.50 



$1,220.00 



Obviously, Mrs. Brownson is a careful house- 
keeper, happily busy trying to make every re- 
luctant dollar give up a hundred cents of value 
and to keep her young son up to the mark. Ob- 
viously, too, she succeeds, for they've just paid 



268 Increasing Home Efficiency 

off the big left-over debt from Mr. Brownson's 
schooling, and are able to give $30 a year to the 
church and contribute to the Young Men's Chris- 
tian Association and the Young Women's Christian 
Association. Now this generosity is right in line 
with Mrs. Brownson's cheerfulness — pleasant char- 
acteristics both — but the community expects 
much bigger gifts from a high school teacher than 
dollars. The community expects him to be a 
mine from which to quarry indefinitely, but a 
modern mine whose supposedly inexhaustible store 
has got to be continually replenished from with- 
out by travel and books and contact with people. 
l\ teacher's mind is a storage battery; it can't 
be charged once for all and then go on emitting 
power forever.1 And the thing that prevents the 
frequent recharging of Mr. Brownson is the menac- 
ing hand of the future reaching backward, grip- 
ping hold of a hundred and forty dollars a year 
and saying: 

"Think what will happen to your family if you 
don't give me this in the form of insurance!" 

It takes hold of the $325 a year savings and says : 

"Give me this in proof that you've remembered 
the rainy day." 

And it leaves the teacher, who ought to have 
some hundred dollars a year to put into books and 
technical equipment alone, with $7 only for maga- 
zines and papers, and $50 for a vacation for three 
people, and not a cent for a lecture or a concert or 
a theater. To be sure, Mrs. Brownson writes 
that they have an extended circle of acquaintances 



Savings and Efficiency 269 

among the " rich, the middle, and the poor classes " ; 
but balance against the consequent social diver- 
sion the fact that all the idiosyncrasies of the 
human imagination have to be trammeled to fit 
the $1.50 a year spent for "incidentals!" 

The food allowance of $180 is well below the 
lower limit of subsistence in most places as ascer- 
tained by the University of Wisconsin, but as 
only $10 went for doctor's bills and nothing at 
all for medicines, the Brownsons seem to have 
been sufficiently fed. This is possible because 
they live in a great fruit and vegetable producing 
State, where one may purchase the luscious water- 
melon at five cents and peaches for so little that 
it is not safe to mention the price, and where flour 
comes down from Duluth by water — altogether 
one of the cheapest places in the country to live. 
But just look at the things that must be left out 
of the account when the fear of age and decrepitude 
steals ^465 a year out of ^1,200. That ugly fear 
steals their chances of present efficiency and looks 
mealy-mouthed and virtuous while it does it! 
And though it may not be true of Mr. Brownson 
in particular, isn't it true in general that such 
sacrifice builds an unjumpable wall in the path 
of a teacher's success.^ And isn't it an indirect 
sacrifice of the brains of all the little Smiths and 
Joneses that sit under him? Of course one can't 
starve when one is old any more complacently 
than at any other age; the grasshopper may have 
become a burden and the caper-berry have failed, 
but one eats notwithstanding. The question is, 



270 Increasing Home Efficiency 

Can the community afford such sacrifice? Isn't 
there some way out? 

Of course the children and their future have got 
to be provided for, either by education or endow- 
ment — that's an axiom; but too often the axiom 
runs in direct opposition to the justifiable demand 
of society that each generation shall give itself 
fully in the present, and its refusal to accept in- 
stead any I. O. U. reading: "In the persons of my 
sons and daughters, I promise to pay — ." 

The attempt to substitute one's children for 
one's self is apt to be disastrous. Of course there 
is the beautiful idea of lifting them a step up, the 
theory that no sacrifices are too great to be made 
for them, that no slaving is real slaving, no hard- 
ships real hardships, where they are concerned; 
and doubtless these thoughts do ease the mind, 
though they don't radically rest the muscle. One 
has got to be pretty sure that it is only one's self 
that one is sacrificing; it may be one's neighbors. 

Mrs. Taylor, wife of a high school principal in 
a Middle Western city, sends us the following 
schedule: 

Budget of a High School Principal in a Middle 
Western City, Wife and Four Children. In- 
come ^3,700 A Year. 

Food $ 500.00 

Shelter (heat, outside cleaning, 

light, etc.) 715.00 

Clothes 333-00 

Operating expenses, etc 128.00 



Savings and EflSciency 271 

Advancement: 

Annuity premium $414.00 

Insurance 94.00 

Taxes (on vacant lots) 25.00 

Tuition at 450.00 

Tuition at 381.00 

Church 30.00 

Allowance to children 1 20.00 

Husband's expenses 510.00 2,024.00 



$3,700.00 



Mrs. Taylor says that she and her husband are 
putting their children through college, and feel 
that this education is a sufficient substitute for 
money to start them in life; but she makes these 
elucidating comments: 

"You will see from this schedule that it is ab- 
solutely necessary that I should do all my work 
myself, including the laundrying. But trying 
to put our children through Eastern colleges was 
too much for some of us, for I have been under a 
severe mental strain, and one daughter has been 
in a sanitarium for months because of a nervous 
breakdown. Teachers as a rule are not paid ac- 
cording to their needs, and have to stint in every- 
thing in order to make a living. We took out an 
annuity policy three years ago for $5,000 to be 
paid up in ten years, which will pay us $250 a year 
till the end of our lives. My husband has life 
insurance for my benefit, the premium of which I 
pay; but after my husband outlives his usefulness 



272 Increasing Home Efficiency 

as a teacher, he and I will have to live on ^250 a 
year, there being no provision made by law to 
help the superannuated teachers." 

Now the Taylors have done the thing which 
ever since the Mayflower landed we Americans 
have tried to do — they have given their children 
OPPORTUNITIES. They have seen the word 
spelled in capitals all their lives, they have pur- 
sued and overtaken it, and are quite willing to pay 
the cost; but does it seem a thing we can afford 
to let them do at the price .^ If^^j ^^ addition to 
their sacrifice of present efficiency, they turn the 
minds of other teachers to the elementary propo- 
sition that such and such an income will give 
such and such things only, that a time will come 
when a teacher's usefulness is over, and that the 
lean years must be provided against out of the 
fat ones, until the less daring ones grow afraid to 
assume the responsibility of children] 

Mr. and Mrs. Carton, out on the Pacific coast, 
have reversed the sacrifice of the Taylors. Mr. 
Carton holds a small professorship at a salary of 
^1,800 in a community where living is high. He 
believed that it was his duty to be a good teacher 
first and a happy man afterward, and that he 
ought not to marry until he had stored up enough 
in his head to be sure of holding his position and 
enough in his pocket to be sure of making a wife 
comfortable. Remember how small is ^1,800 a 
year on the Pacific coast! After a long engage- 
ment he married and continued to save. He didn't 
dare cut off chances to study — competition for his 



Savings and Efficiency 273 

job was too keen; so there were summer courses and 
conventions and a year's leave of absence and a lit- 
tle travel and lots of books, and always the saving, 
saving, saving, urged by a little tormenting demon 
sitting in the back of his head who whispered: 

"You're going to be old! Suppose you fall ill? 
What about accident? What will happen to your 
wife? You've got to provide for her!" 

And that ruthless demon reached over and drew 
worry lines about Mr. Carton's eyes, and picked 
out his hairs, and troubled his soul, and whispered 
always: "One must either provide for children 
or go without them!" and kept him and his wife 
always alone. 

To be sure, he tried to supplement his income 
by writing text-books and giving lectures and 
doing the other things which lead Dr. Henry S. 
Pritchett of the Carnegie Foundation to say: 

"A large proportion of the teachers in American 
universities are engaged in turning the grindstone 
of some outside employment with one hand while 
they carry on the work of teaching with the other." 

Again, it is the fear of age and poverty that 
has stolen from the community the children the 
Cartons might have had, and their home as judged 
by its output is only half efficient. It has given 
a good teacher, but it has stopped short at this 
generation. This too seems a waste we can't 
afford, and is referable to the same cause which 
makes the high school teachers in communities 
where there is "no provision made by law to help 
the superannuated" put so large a proportion of 



274 Increasing Home Efficiency 

their salaries into savings instead of present effi- 
ciency. With 446,133 teachers in the United 
States, these wastes bear seriously both upon edu- 
cation and the home. 

Fortunately, we know the cure of this evil as 
well as we know the uses of q^uinine. Let a cured 
patient explain. 

He is Mr. Forsythe, professor in a small Eastern 
college. He receives $1,800 a year, is entitled to 
a pension at the age of sixty-five or after twenty- 
five years of service, and his wife, in case of his 
death, will have a widow's allowance. The fear 
of the future either for him or his, need not steal 
anything at all from the present. Here is his 
family budget: 

Budget of an Eastern College Professor with 
A Wife and Two Children. Income $1,800 a 
Year. 

Food $ 260.00 

Shelter (payments on house and 

farm) 500.00 

Clothes and personal expenses: 

Children $ 60.00 

Wife 120.00 

Husband 90.00 270.00 

Operating Expenses: 

Fuel ^120.00 

Service 72.00 

Telephone 18.00 

Light and gas 24.00 234.00 



Savings and Efficiency 275 

Advancement: 

Life insurance $192.00 

Benevolence 84.00 

Incidentals 80.00 

Surplus 180.00 536.00 



$1,800.00 



About some of the items in this budget Mr. 
Forsythe is slightly apologetic; they are the items 
that look even remotely like savings. Why should 
they buy a home.^ Mr. Forsythe explains: 

"Families without children in are able 

to get pleasant apartments for $20 a month, but 
our reason for purchasing a house v^as that in this 
wa.y we secured a very large lot where our children 
might have plenty of air and sunshine and be safe." 

Sort of in loco nursemaidce! Now nurse-maids 
average about five dollars a week — that is, $260 
a year — besides food and lodging. To buy that 
house looks like good business. Professor Forsythe 
writes : 

"The natural beauty of our premises — there is 
a steep rocky slope back of us crowned with oaks 
and pines — and the privacy and repose are also 
worth much to us. Almost every year we purchase 
a few trees or shrubs for our grounds, and we also 
bring young pines and hemlocks from the woods 
and set them out where we hope they will grow to 
be things of beauty. Our home is a pleasant place 
to live and work in, and a dear refuge to look 
forward to after hours of outside work. 



276 Increasing Home Efficiency 

"We also bought a little farm in order that we 
might be able to escape completely from our or- 
dinary activities during the summer months and 
live unconventionally in the midst of natural 
beauty. Most people, doubtless, would not find 
so long a vacation needful, but we find that only 
in this way can we recuperate from the wear and 
tear of the year's work." 

The Forsythe home-buying, which with many 
people would be a form of investment, is to them 
a luxurious indulgence, making them more efii- 
cient at the present time. 

But there is life insurance; what is the present 
value of that.^ Again Mr. Forsythe: 

"This pays for endowment policies which will 
mature in from twelve to fifteen years, and we 
propose to devote the greater part of the money 
to completing the payments on the house." 

That food allowance in the budget looks dan- 
gerously low; but we have taken pains to check up 
prices in that particular region, and find that 
butter, eggs and milk are considerably cheaper 
than in most places, fish at least a third less, while 
meat, vegetables, and fruit are about the average. 
Then, as Mr. Forsythe explains: 

"Our home and farm orchard supply us with 
abundant apples and pears, and, eating them 
freely, we purchase relatively less quantities of 
vegetables." 

So, evidently, part of the cost of "shelter" 
ought to be credited to the food account. But the 
final test of the food supply is the doctor's bill 



Savings and Efficiency 277 

and except for the expenses incident to the birth 
of the two children and a surgical operation in no 
way related to too little food, no mention is made 
of a physician's charge. 

Let us slide past the easily explained items of 
fuel, service (occasional help only), clothes (Mrs. 
Forsythe makes many of the children's clothes), 
down to the last three items — benevolence, in- 
cidentals, and surplus. 

Benevolence includes church dues, contribu- 
tions to charity, and membership fees in civic 
and benevolent associations. Incidentals include 
presents, flowers, theater and concert tickets, 
railway fares to attend teachers' conventions and 
"classical organizations," and the eight regular 
magazines that come Into the house. Mr. Forsythe 
mentions that they have access to all the best 
magazines In the college library also. They plan 
to attend the good plays, operas, and concerts 
during the year. "Needless to say," he concludes, 
"we always overrun this appropriation twenty 
to forty dollars." And this brings us to the last 
item — surplus, which isn't really a surplus at all, 
but elbow room in the other departments. It 
buys them a few good books every year, besides 
the technical ones for the professor's work; it 
buys music for Mrs. Forsythe to play and sing; 
it buys pictures for their walls; and It Is hoarding 
itself up by littles to buy a new piano in place of 
the old one. 

All this is for themselves, of course; now what 
are they doing for others ? Mr. Forsythe writes : 



278 Increasing Home Efficiency 

"We plan to invite the students as often as 
we can, by classes, or in groups of four or five for 
dinner, or to tea on Sunday afternoons. And we 
are trying to reach some of the foreign population 
and get them to come to our house. My wife 
devotes all the time and strength she can to as- 
sisting in the management of a working-girls' 
home and a model employment bureau, besides 
doing a good deal for the young women in our 
college." 

"But," Mr. Carton of the Pacific coast, or Mrs. 
Brownson of the Middle West, might ask, "how 
about providing for those two children.^ Do you 
mean to foist penniless offspring upon an already 
glutted community?" 

"They'll have an education in place of a home," 
their father might answer. 

"But," we can hear Mrs. Taylor pipe up, "do 
you labor under the delusion that you can edu- 
cate your children for nothing.'' Look at my ex- 
perience!" 

Such questions do not fluster Mr. Forsythe, 
because, thanks to his pension, he is free to spend 
all of his income on the present efficiency of his 
home as a factory for the production of citizens. 
Something more (this is not included in the bond, 
and just happens to be within our knowledge) 
Mr. Forsythe is giving back to the community a 
lot of first-rate influence on his pupils quite aside 
from the mere technique of his special subject, 
and he is giving text-books that toiling youngsters 
may not indeed struggle with joyously — such is 



Savings and Efficiency 279 

the perverse nature of the young — but which they 
may at least absorb with profit. 

And Professor Forsythe writes that his family 
is fairly typical of those in his college community. 

Now, if he is right, we have come to the cure of 
a lot of ills and the solution of a lot of problems. 
No doubt before the days of pensions there were 
teachers in high schools and colleges who matched 
Mr. Forsythe's twofold efficiency, but in the scores 
of letters that have come to us, his is distinguished 
by its confident spirit of present freedom. He is 
joyfully concentrating his entire energy upon his 
immediate maximum production, while through 
the letters of his unprotected co-workers runs a 
pre-occupying concern for the future. 

We're not for one moment criticising those 
other teachers. Under the circumstances, how 
could they do other than they do? But what 
shall be said of a community which forces them to 
make a choice between sacrificing their homes and 
sacrificing their service.^ 

Yesterday we asked the head of a great public 
school system: "If you knew that you would have 
a pension for your old age, and that your family 
would be provided for if you died, would it make 
any difi"erence In your work.^" 

He began to walk up and down the room. 

" It would make me thirty — no, forty — per cent 
more efficient right now! The thought of what 
might happen to them if I were scrapped, is a ball 
and chain on my foot, holding me back from no 
end of things I niight and ought to do." 



28o Increasing Home Efficiency 

And just what might happen to them and to 
him? 

An old teacher with 43 years of hard work be- 
hind him writes: 

"Commencing when I was nineteen years old, 
my life has been one long struggle. There have 
been no pleasure trips in the summer nor theater 
parties in the winter. Love for each other and 
for God has been our comfort. I find myself at 
sixty-three years of age without a shelter for old 
age, depending for future necessities upon the 
promises of the Bible and the love of my children.'' 

Now it is not that this man is in danger of being 
cold or hungry or having no roof over his head, but 
that after having rendered valuable service to the 
community, after having brought up and educated 
five children, after having struggled and denied 
himself for forty-three years, we allow him to 
taste this last bitterness of the middle class — and 
allow to all of ourselves a lifelong foretaste of this 
bitterness in our own mouths. 

According to the calculations just published by 
Mr. Lee Welling Squier, there are at this moment 
a million and a quarter men and women over sixty- 
five tasting the bitterness of dependence in the 
United States. And they're not dependent through 
their own fault either, but through our collec- 
tive fault and their personal misfortune, for as the 
Massachusetts Commission on Old Age Pensions, 
Annuities and Insurance reports, sixty and one- 
tenth per cent of the old age dependents who have 
lost their property attribute their loss to extra ex- 



Savings and ElBBciency 281 

penses on account of sickness and emergencies. 
It is generally estimated that seventy-two per 
cent of existing pauperism throughout the United 
States is attributable to misfortune. 

And how this middle class does try to save! 
How it takes out insurance and goes into building 
and loan associations and supports savings banks! 
The representative of one of the great life insur- 
ance companies told us that almost all their endow- 
ment policies were taken out by people with in- 
comes between ^2,400 and ^3,000 a year. 

Here are the average amounts the middle class 
puts into insurance and savings, compiled from 
our budgets and classified by occupations. 

Capitalists $ 70.00 

Clergymen io5-99 

Farmers 267.38 

Physicians 276.00 

Miscellaneous professions 3I4-07 

Mechanics 3I7-30 

Educators 346.56 

Clerks, Accountants, salaried employees .... 381.02 

Business men 626.93 

Obviously the small capitalists do not need to 
save because they are already living on incomes 
which are entirely independent of their own earn- 
ing capacity. The clergymen don't save because 
they can't — the requirements put upon them are 
so heavy that instead of being able to save, they 
run up larger average deficits than any other class. 
Large provision for the future is not so necessary 



282 Increasing Home Efficiency 

for farmers because in general the farm itself con- 
stitutes a permanent income. But the others — ! 
Take the clerks who are on comparatively low 
paid jobs, and save $381.02 a year. 

How hard this saving bears upon their homes is 
shown by the results of a poll taken by a Washing- 
ton, D. C, newspaper among 10,000 civil service 
employes. Seventy-one per cent of them indi- 
cated that their incomes were so low that to save 
any part of them for old age would be a hardship 
quite impossible to contemplate. But even sup- 
pose that this group of the middle class should 
put all of their annual savings into the bank for 
the twenty years they may be supposed to hold 
their positions, what would they have at the end 
of iti^ — $7,620.40, which at the high rate of six 
per cent, would provide them with an income of 
$457.22 — much less than it would cost them to 
live in decency! 

Now if this hampering fear of old age so cuts 
down the efficiency of teachers who are better 
paid and more sure of their jobs, how much must 
it decrease the value of the work these clerks 
give in return for their salaries! 

And yet how many things — things that are 
necessary to the efficiency of the home, we make 
contingent upon the savings which by cutting down 
the present income may make social efficiency 
impossible. 

"We are saving with a view to owning a home 
of our own," writes one. 

"We hope to raise a family of children and are 



Savings and Efficiency* 283 

saving and expect to save for their education,'' 
writes another — making the great social contribu- 
tion of children dependent upon the power to save. 

"We have been able to save a larger proportion 
of our income this year than ever before. My hus- 
band is forty-one years of age, and we feel that we 
are at the height of our health and strength and 
must save for the future when the income may be 
much smaller," writes a woman, triumphing in the 
things she is learning to do without. 

"When I know that we have put by enough, so 
that we can receive even two-thirds of my hus- 
band's present salary for the rest of our lives, the 
whole face of nature will change for me," writes 
the wife of a Boston salaried man who is foregoing 
the opportunities of the present to win security 
for old age. 

But this Gorgon of thrift is dying — slowly per- 
haps, hardly more than by inches, but still dying. 
We are learning that if the home must be a sav- 
ings bank, it must conserve more precious things 
than dollars. As the wife of a western engineer 
says: 

"Homekeeping, I take it, means more than a 
matter of endless contriving and economy. When 
I find that I am too tired at night to be a com- 
panion to my husband, or that my brain is repeat- y' 
ing over and over the details of to-morrow's work 
lest a precious moment be wasted, then I know 
that my body and brain have received what my 
engineer relatives would call a 'permanent set,' — 
that they have passed their elastic limit of strain, 



284 Increasing Home Efficiency 

and will not return of themselves to their normal 
state. And that is the point at which I believe in 
substituting money for brain and muscle. Suppose 
I do throw away the meat-bones without making a 
delicious soup of them? I am ready to slip into a 
fresh gown before dinner, to pick a posey for the 
table, to tell the baby a story, to read with my 
husband, and to go to bed with a clear conscience 
and a quiet mind." 

And so the wife of an Eastern business man: 

"If anything should happen to my husband, we 
are provided for and nobody, I don't care who it 
is or how many millions they own, — nobody has 
a better time than we do. Nobody's children 
have better advantages or are more loved and 
cherished." 

Now isn't the attitude of mind shown by these 
two women what we would like to sow broadcast 
over the race.^ Doesn't happiness, and the quiet 
mind, the certainty of being able to provide for 
your children, and of not coming to want your- 
self, make for home efficiency in the present.'* 
Because after all, it is the fear of dependency and 
of the shame we have attached to it that forces 
people to scrimp and hoard to the present disad- 
vantage of us all. 

And as a matter of fact, public provision for aged 
dependents is not a new thing. Each year the 
government pays something like ^114,590,068.24 
to civil war veterans who average seventy years 
of age, and while we have no complete statistics 
of the disbursements of public and private philan- 



Savings and EflSciency 285 

thropies, we know that at least $64,309,900.17 
goes into public and private homes for old people 
through these channels. Here is a community 
charge of $178,899,968.41 a year. Mr. Squier in 
his book Old Age Dependency in the United States 
estimates that other forms of contribution would 
bring this up to at least $250,000,000. 

Obviously the money which might provide 
security for old age is being spent now, but except 
in the case of the civil war veterans it is spent 
grudgingly after the mischief has been done, and 
as a result the community derives a minimum 
benefit from the investment. Moreover, it is so 
spent that those who receive it are branded with 
the disgraceful mark of pauperism. The problem 
is to disburse this money with honor, — to make 
it what it really is, a deferred payment to the old 
for their past service to the community. For even 
if people have not saved money during their youth, 
it is idle to say that they have not contributed to 
the wealth of the State. Besides, as Chancellor 
David Lloyd-George said before the English 
House of Commons: 

"As long as you have taxes upon commodities 
which are consumed by practically every family 
in the country, there is no such thing as a non- 
contributary old age pension scheme. If you tax 
tea and coffee, sugar, beer and tobacco, you hit 
everybody one way or another. Indeed when a 
scheme is financed from public funds, it is just as 
much a contributary scheme as one financed 
directly by means of contributions." 



286 Increasing Home Efficiency 

Once we have established the principle that it 
is for the advantage of society that every normal 
member of it should live in decency, and once we 
have established the financial minimum both for 
decency and efficiency, we shall no longer en- 
courage those who have not the minimum for 
efficiency to trim it still further for the sake of 
savings or insurance. A thrift which encourages 
them to do this is a social vice not a virtue. 

Since we do in fact provide for the aged now at a 
cost of ^250,000,000 a year, why not do it in a way 
to promote the present efficiency of those to whom 
the money will ultimately be paid ? If a man takes 
out an insurance policy, he merely turns over to a 
private corporation certain siims of money upon 
which the corporation does ultimately pay a cer- 
tain interest, but which it uses in the meanwhile 
to its own very considerable profit. If instead of 
turning over these sums of money to private busi- 
ness, he should be free to turn over to the com- 
munity an equivalent in brain and muscle, would 
it not profit the community to make deferred pay- 
ments upon his social service? If retiring pensions 
promote efficiency among college professors, why 
would they not do the same among the entire 
middle class .^ 

This whole business of individual saving works 
around In a vicious circle. If you have too small 
an income to provide against emergencies, you 
must further reduce your working capital by sav- 
ing to meet them; if your tenure of work is uncer- 
tain, you must reduce your chance of enhancing 



Savings and Efficiency 287 

your economic value by saving against unemploy- 
ment; — the very sense of security which you try 
to create by saving is destroyed by the necessity 
of saving. And the remedy for this evil Is a uni- 
versal system of scientifically administered In- 
surance against sickness, unemployment and old 
age. 

Psychologists tell us that we have Inherited use- 
less hates and desires and fears from the strange 
pre-human times, — feelings that serve no protec- 
tive purpose In this new world we have made for 
ourselves since our late tree-dwelling. We still 
have the monkey fear of the great swallowing 
python, but we apply It to the unwilling worm; the 
fear of the dark room Is the harmless survival of 
the fear of lurking beasts; and, worse fear of all, 
that fear that came with our first power to reason, 
— fear of the helplessness of age. For very early 
we saw that the great prizes of food and shelter 
were only to the strong, and except he provide 
these out of the strength of his youth, how shall 
an old man llve.^ 

It Is for us as an organized community to say 
whether we shall have savings with fear, or freedom 
with efficiency. 



CHAPTER XIV 
One Answer to Many Questions 

IT Is now nearly three years since the question 
raised by our middle-class neighbor in the 
attractive middle-class suburb when she cried 
out that she was nothing but a clearing house for 
the family bills and did not control any of the 
things that she used In her housekeeping, sent us 
on a journey of discovery through the middle-class 
country. We have run up and down the land both 
personally and by letter, and have piled up about 
ourselves a great modern kitchen midden of middle- 
class beliefs and practices. 

We have not found the middle-class housewife 
perplexed over how to cook, or clean, over how to 
serve her meals or how to wash her clothes. The 
technique of these employments has been pretty 
well worked out, and the general feeling seems to 
be that the woman who hasn't mastered them has 
nobody to blame but herself or her grandmother. 
Any one who can measure flour In a cup and 
watch the clock, can cook. 

Our grandmothers had no call to make this cry 
that they did not control the things they used in 
their housekeeping — they did. They made, or 
grew, or foraged, practically everything they con- 

288 



One Answer to Many Questions 289 

sumed — they and our grandfathers together. If 
they wanted a chair they built it, if they wanted 
light they made candles, if they wanted news 
they went out and collected it from the neighbors. 
Their problems were close by, under their four 
hands, and being able men and women they solved 
them, eventually. But the time must have been 
when they were as much baffled by their prob- 
lems as we are by ours today. We are not less 
able than they were. We are not failing to solve 
problems which they mastered. We are not degen- 
erating, but we are struggling vv^ith a span fire new 
set of original problems. It is as though we were 
the first who had ever been asked to prove that 
the square erected on the hypothenuse of a right 
triangle was equal to the sum of the squares on 
the other two sides. Did the philosopher who 
first met up with that familiar puzzle crack his 
heels together and solve it with a gladsome shout .^ 
Hardly! 

Our ancestors had easier problems to solve than 
we have for the very simple reason that theirs were 
nearer at hand. Ours must be solved at long 
range. The tools which the middle-class house- 
wife once used to feed and clothe and educate her 
children have fled from the middle-class home, and 
the middle-class housewife, hampered by the 
length of the lever she must use to control them, 
bound by the romantic tradition of the "Proper 
sphere of woman," and terrified at the indeli- 
cate possibility of appearing unwomanly, flutters 
ineptly on her threshold. 



290 Increasing Home EflBciency 

Part of her inefficiency would seem to grow out 
of the mental confusion under which the middle- 
class woman labors. She seems to think that her 
function is to preserve the home as a sort of shrine, 
a thing apart, an end in itself. She does not see 
it as a part of the great factory for the production 
of citizens, nor understand that her job is exactly 
the same as that of any other factory manager — 
to turn out the product. Shall she preserve the 
white hands of her sensibilities at the expense of 
the race. ^ 

The things with which the on-coming citizens are 
to be fed and clothed and educated and launched 
are no longer within the gates of the home. The 
industrial revolution in sweeping the loom and 
the distaif into the factory, in trustifying the pro- 
duction of cloth and food, in substituting the tele- 
phone and telegraph for the village crier and the 
neighborhood gossip, the railroad and trolley for 
the democrat and prairie schooner, the public 
school for the itinerant pedagogue, has dropped 
such a boulder into the "circle of woman's in- 
fluence" as has spread waves to the ends of the 
earth. So long as women content themselves 
with fluttering about inside four walls under the 
delusion that these mark their proper sphere of 
activity, they cannot so much as grapple the prob- 
lem of home efficiency. They must do their work 
where it is to be done if they do it at all. 

Woman the idler, must become woman the 
worker. She must do the same work she did before 
the invention of steam engine and power loom left 



One Answer to Many Questions 291 

her sitting empty handed. She must do the same 
work her greatgrandmother did, but by the new and 
improved methods. She must follow her tools of 
production into the mine, the mill and the factory. 
It is as much her duty today to see to it that her 
tools are wisely used in the interest of her home 
and in fairness to the workers as it ever was. And 
since production without adequate distribution is 
vain, it is as much her business as it ever was 
to control the means of distribution. The evi- 
dent fact that no woman can do any of these 
things single handed, is but another proof that she 
must fit the manner of her work to the new condi- 
tions. XShe must get out of the individualistic 
groove in which she is helpless, she must see her 
home as part of a greater unit to be controlled only 
by the greater power of many people working 
together. She must democratize industry as we 
are striving to democratize government. If the 
truth were knQwn Politics and Parenthood are 
pretty close kinT/ 

In a word th^^one ansv/er to many questions is 
that the middle-class mother must stop soldiering 
on her job; she must follow the spinning wheel 
into the world; she must take up her share of the 
duties of citizenship. For after all what is the 
home but a flower pot in which to grow the family 
tree.f* What are all the family trees for but to 
furnish the timber for the social building.^ And 
yet today industry and the home are in a state of 
abnormal and immoral divorce. The health goes 
out of industry when it forgets that its only nor- 



292 Increasing Home Efficiency 

mal purpose Is to cooperate with the home, not 
as equal but as servant, in the perpetuation of the 
race and the nurture of good citizens. So long 
as women do not do the work set for them to do, 
and men make business a gamble and a sport, our 
homes cannot be efficient. Business is woman's 
affair as much as man's. The home is man's affair 
as much as woman's. What we need most today 
is the domestication of business and the socializa- 
tion of the home. 

We have found that the goddess of the Home 
is Our Lady of Public Service, — not the hired girl. 
That the altar of the home isn't the cook-stove 
but the factory furnace, and that when God made 
homemakers, male and female created He them!^ 



APPENDIX 

Individual and Group Budgets 

A I AHE following budgets have been selected 
from those we have collected because in 



1 



every case we have reason to believe 
that they are correct. In the group budgets, 
classified by income, occupation and locality we 
have used some additional budgets which came 
into our hands after the series printed here was 
compiled. 

We have classified the expenditures under seven 
headings: food, shelter, clothing, operation, ad- 
vancement, incidentals and deficit. 

Food includes not only the amount spent in 
money, but also the estimated value of the food 
raised. We believe that the minimum expenditure 
for health is approximately 35c. per adult man per 
day under the present prices of food stuffs. With 
this as a basis we have used the scale adopted by 
the United States Department of Agriculture 
which is as follows: 

An adult woman requires .8 as much as an adult man 
A boy of 15 to 16 " .9 " " " " " " 
A " " 13 " 14 " .8 " " " " " 
A " " 12 " .7 " " " " " " 

A " " 10 " II " .6 " " " " " " 

293 



294 



Appendix 



A girl of 15 to 16 requires .8 as much as an adult man 
A " " 13 " 14 
A " " 10 " 12 

A child from 6 to 9 
A " " 2 " 5 
A " under 2 



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In the case of families who have gardens of 
their own we have used this scale to estimate the 
value of food raised which we have added to the, 
cost of food purchased. The cost of shelter in- 
cludes rent, or taxes, or payment on a mort- 
gage. 

Under the heading Operation, arc grouped the 
items light, heat, refurnishing, repairs, service 
(which includes laundry and the services of a 
barber) telephone, express and all other items 
connected with the running of the home plant. 

Advancement includes money spent for church, 
benevolence, health, insurance, savings, travel, 
recreation, entertainment, education, books, post- 
age, telegrams and other things not absolutely 
necessary to the continuance of the family. 

Where the family runs a deficit, the amount 
of it is added to the money income in estimating 
the total income, on the theory that the family 
has consumed goods to this amount whether they 
have paid for them or not. As in the case of 
the food which a farmer's family consumes, the 
real income is the sum of all the things the family 
has enjoyed rather than those they have paid 
for. 



Appendix 295 



Key to items under Advancement 
"C"— Church 
"B"— Benevolence 
"H"— Health 
**!" — Insurance 
*'S''— Savings 



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00 



'~r<HE following pages contain advertisements of a 
few of the Macmillan books on related subjects. 



Human Foods 

By HARRY SNYDER, B. S., Professor of Agricultural Chem- 
istry, University of Minnesota, and Chemist of the Minnesota 
Agricultural Experiment Station. 

Illustrated, cloth, i2mo, 362 pages, $1.25 net. 
A discussion of the composition and physical properties of goods, 
the main factors which affect their nutritive value, etc. 

Principles of Human Nutrition 

A Study in Practical Dietetics. By WHITMAN H. JORDAN, 

Director of the New York Agricultural Experiment Station. 

Cloth, i2mo, 450 pages, index, $1.75 net; by mail, $i.8g 

The present work is a concise presentation of the subject-matter 
related to human nutrition which will be more or less adapted to 
popular use, but particularly to instruction of students with moderate 
scientific acquirements, whether in colleges, secondary schools, short 
courses, schools of domestic science, or correspondence schools. The 
reliable knowledge bearing on the nutrition of man is mainly to be 
found in elaborate works on physiology and physiological chemistry, 
the contents of which are not generally available. Moreover, the 
highly technical facts are usually not centered around a philosophy 
of living. The aim here has been to show the adjustment of this 
knowledge to a rational system of nutrition without insisting upon 
adherence to technical details that are not feasible in the ordinary 
administration of the family dietary. 

Throughout the author has relied upon the conclusions of those 
authorities and investigators whose sound scholarship in this field of 
knowledge is imquestioned. 



PUBLISHED BY 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



A New Work on one of the Great Questions of the Day 

The Business of Being a Woman 

By IDA M. TARBELL 

Cloth, i2mo, $1.25 net; postpaid $1.37 



What is the business of being a woman? Is it something incom- 
patible with the free and joyous development of one's talents? Is 
there no place in it for economic independence? Has it no essential 
relation to the world's movements? Is it an episode which drains 
the forces and leaves a dreary wreck behind? Is it something that 
cannot be organized into a profession of dignity and opportunity 
for service and for happiness? These are some of the questions 
Miss Tarbell answers. She has treated on broad lines the political, 
social and economic issues of to-day as they afifect woman. SufiFragc, 
Woman and the Household, The Home as an Educational Center, 
the Homeless Daughter, Friendless Youth and the Irresponsible 
Woman — these but suggest the train of Miss Tarbell's thought; 
she has made out of them because of their bearing on all of her sex, 
a powerful, unified narrative. 



PUBLISHED BY 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



The Book of Woman's Power 

Introduction by Miss IDA M. TARE ELL 

Cloth, i6mo, $1.25 net; leather, $1. 75 net 
In this book are brought together and set forth "simply and with- 
out contention the best which has been written of the potent, varied 
relation of Woman to Society. Whether its readers favor "votes for 
women" or not, the book will make an especial appeal to the atten- 
tion of all interested in that subject. 



Woman and Social Progress 

A Discussion of the Biologic, Domestic, Industrial, and 
Social Possibilities of American Women 

By SCOTT NEARING and NELLIE M. S. NEARING 

Cloth, $1.50 net; postpaid, $1.62 
In this discussion of Woman and Social Progress, the authors 
are not at all concerned with the relations of woman's capacity to 
man's, but with the relation of her capacity to her opportunities and 
to her achievement. The biologic, domestic, industrial, and social 
possibihties of American women are discussed at length. The work 
proves that women have capacity, and that it matters not a whit 
whether that capacity be equal to man's, inferior, or superior. If 
women have capacity, if they are capable of achievement, then they 
can, as individuals, play a part in the drama of life. The world 
abounds in work, a great deal of which will not be done at all unless 
it is done by women. If it can be shown that women have capacity 
for work, every relation of social justice and every need of social 
progress demand that this opportunity and this capacity be corre- 
lated in such a manner as to insure women's achievement. These 
are the theses which are proposed in the early chapters of the work. 
Succeeding chapters contain the solution, viz.: that women's capacity, 
if combined with opportunity, will necessarily result in achieve- 
ment; that therefore they should take their places as individuals 
in the vangxiard of an advancing civilization. 



PUBLISHED BY 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



The Development of the Child 

By NATHAN OPPENHEIM, M. D 

Cloth, i2mo, $1.25 net 
" 'The Development of the Child/ by Nathan Oppenheim, is a 
most valuable contribution to a subject of universal importance and 
interest. The book is written from full knowledge, and it is practical; 
it should be studied by every parent, and if its wise counsels were 
followed the child would be the happier and the better for it. Dr. 
Oppenheim gives the best and the soundest of advice, he is always 
scientific, even when he is opposing some of the cherished isms of 
our day, and his book stands in the very front rank as a lucid, well- 
reasoned, and trustworthy guide on the development of the child." 
— Boston Saturday Evening Gazette. 

The Medical Diseases of Childhood 

By NATHAN OPPENHEIM A. B. (Harv.), M. D. (Coll. 
P. & S., N. Y.). Attending Physician to the Children's De- 
partment of Mt. Sinai Hospital Dispensary; author of "The 
Development of the Child." 

With loi original illustrations in half tone, and 
ig temperature, pulse, and respiration charts; cloth, 
8vo, $5.00; sheep, $6.00; half morocco, $6.50 net 
"Dr. Oppenheim shows himself a careful and judicious investigator, 
and is happily free from the hasty generalization which makes use- 
less so much of the literature deahng with the facts of child life." — 
Journal of Pedagogy. 

"It is difficult to restrain one's enthusiasm when speaking of it." — 
The Outlook. 

"His book should be read by all who are interested in the proper 
education and training of children. They will find in it a good deal 
of original thought and many valuable suggestions." — New York 
Herald. 



PUBLISHED BY 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



Food for the Invalid and the Convalescent 

By WINIFRED STUART GIBBS 

Price $.75 net, by mail $.81 
A great many books of special menus have been published, but 
upon one and all the same comment may be made — they are too 
elaborate. They mean either the expenditure of too much money 
or too much time and patience. It has long been realized that there 
was a decided need for a book of few pages which shall concisely set 
forth simple, inexpensive meals from which the greatest amount of 
nutritive values may be obtained. 

This has been exactly Miss Winifred Stuart Gibbs's purpose in 
this work, a fitting sub-title for which might be "A Maximum of 
Nutrition, a Minimum of Expenditure." Beginning with a few 
general articles on how to buy food, how to keep food from spoiling, 
the kinds of food to eat, the necessity of good cooking and how to 
cook, Miss Gibbs passes rapidly to her two main considerations, the 
preparation of the various classes of food and the combinations of 
food into special menus and diets. In the first part, drinks, liquid 
foods, soups, meats, fats, fish, eggs, cereals, breads, vegetables, fruits 
and desserts are considered, while in the second part the menus are 
divided into three classes, those for the healthy, for children, and 
for the sick and convalescent. 



PUBLISHED BY 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



H 122 81 



